Posted on September 2nd, 2015 in AK Book Excerpts
It’s somewhat difficult to choose an excerpt from Davide Turcato’s new book, because a) there’s so much goodness in it and b) Malatesta’s ideas evolve so much over time (always as a result of his “experimental” revolutionary method). But the following seems like a decent choice, for it’s relevance to questions many of us are trying to get our heads around today. Enjoy the taste. And, really, get the book: a few of us read it when it was still a $90 academic hard cover and it blew us away. We knew that we had to create an affordable paperback version for you guys!
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The indeterminacy of social action
The theoretical foundations of the insurrectionary tactics that underpinned Malatesta’s action of the early 1890s were illustrated in a series of articles that appeared in L’Associazione. In these articles Malatesta explained his positive outlook on uprisings. His outlook was based on theoretical notions, such as the indeterminacy of collective action and the precedence of deeds over ideas, that were already implicit in the tactics of propaganda by the deed that Italian anarchists began advocating in the mid-1870s. In L’Associazione Malatesta reiterated his belief in propaganda by the deed, at the same time that he thoroughly reviewed this concept, in the light of past experiences and changed conditions.
Malatesta articulated his appreciation of uprisings as steps on the path of revolution in the article ‘La sommossa non é rivoluzione’ (An uprising is not a revolution) of October 1889. This was Malatesta’s response to an article by the same title published in the Italian socialist revolutionary periodical La Rivendicazione, in which N. Sandri claimed that ‘every partial uprising is an aborted revolution’. Malatesta retorted that uprisings played an immense role in provoking and preparing revolutions. For Malatesta, ‘it is always deeds that provoke ideas, which in turn act upon deeds, and so on’. He pointed to the history of past revolutions, which were all preceded, provoked, and determined by numerous uprisings that prepared people’s minds to the struggle: ‘The great French revolution would not have occurred if the countryside—worked up by a thorough propaganda—had not started to burn castles and hang masters, and if the people of Paris in tumult had not committed the sublime folly of attacking the Bastille with pikes.’ The history of socialism itself provided further evidence with the Paris Commune, which arose from an uprising in Montmartre, and which in turn originated a splendid movement of ideas, and a whole period of feverish socialist activism. Revolutions had nowhere to start from than uprisings: ‘Certainly, while all uprisings make propaganda, only few have the good fortune to arrive at the right time to determine a revolution. Yet who can say what is the right time?’
The key concept outlined here by Malatesta is the indeterminacy of collective action. No one can fully foresee the outcome of one’s intentional social action, nor is the outcome of collective action necessarily what its participants had initially envisioned.
Similar ideas dotted Malatesta’s writings from 1889 on. Commenting upon the Rotterdam strike of September 1889 Malatesta had remarked that ‘history shows that revolutions start almost invariably with moderate demands, more in the form of protests against abuses than of revolts against the essence of institutions, and often with displays of respect and devotion to the authorities’ (‘Altro’).
In 1894 he expressed the same concept, with reference to the French Revolution and to the recent movement of the Sicilian Fasci: ‘Let us remember that the people of Paris started off by demanding bread to the king amidst applauses and tears of affection, yet—having received bullets instead of bread, as it was natural—after two years they beheaded him. And it was only yesterday that the Sicilian people were on the verge of making a revolution while cheering to the king and his whole family’ (‘Andiamo’).
Malatesta still reiterated the idea in writings of two decades later. In 1914 a strike of the railway workers in Italy was creating serious difficulties to the government. In the article ‘É possibile la rivoluzioné’ Malatesta started by claiming, ‘Naturally we do not know what could happen in the near future.’ He then emphasized how a minor issue over salaries had escalated into a serious crisis, and pictured a hypothetical scenario, which really looks like a disguised call for action: ‘If really—people wonder—the railway workers refused to work; if ill-intentioned people made even a limited service impossible, sabotaging the rolling stock and the railway tracks; if the most conscious part of the proletariat supported the movement with general strikes: what would the government do with its soldiers, even supposing that the latter failed to remember that they are forcefully enlisted proletarians, and that their fathers, brothers, and friends are among the strikers? How could the current order continue?’ Malatesta argued that revolution would impose itself as a necessity, for it alone could ensure the continuation of social life. ‘Perhaps this will not happen today. Still, why could not it happen tomorrow?’ After maintaining that nobody knows in advance when the times are really ripe and that the fateful hour could strike at any moment, Malatesta concluded: ‘Everybody keep ready for tomorrow . . . or for today.’ Only a few weeks later the insurrectional movement of the Red Week broke out, in which Malatesta had a leading role. It would be problematic to retrospectively determine whether Malatesta’s prediction should be read descriptively as that of a perceptive sociologist or prescriptively as that of an effective agitator.
Posted on July 17th, 2015 in Events
An afternoon talk with the editors and authors of the new book Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South.
About Dixie Be Damned: In 1891, when coal companies in eastern Tennessee brought in cheap convict labor to take over their jobs, workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains. Over the next year, tactics escalated to include burning company property and looting company stores. This was one of the largest insurrections in US working-class history. It happened at the same time as the widely publicized northern labor war in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And it was largely ignored, then and now. Dixie Be Damned engages seven similarly “hidden” insurrectionary episodes in Southern history to demonstrate the region’s long arc of revolt. Countering images of the South as pacified and conservative, this adventurous retelling presents history in the rough. Not the image of the South many expect, this is the South of maroon rebellion, wildcat strikes, and Robert F. Williams’s book Negroes with Guns, a South where the dispossessed refuse to quietly suffer their fate. This is people’s history at its best: slave revolts, multiracial banditry, labor battles, prison uprisings, urban riots, and more.
Learn more about the book here: http://www.akpress.org/dixie-be-damned.html
RSVP and invite people to this event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1622687197980187/
Posted on July 17th, 2015 in Events
A discussion with Michael Staudenmaier, author of Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization 1969-1986, and Alan Rausch, a former member of the Sojourner Truth Organization on New Left organizing in the 1970s.
About Truth and Revolution: In the 1970s and 1980s, as the movements of the sixties receded from view, the revolutionary left in the United States went through a series of profound political, demographic, and cultural transformations as it struggled to find its footing in a rapidly changing world. The unorthodox political agenda of the Sojourner Truth Organization represents a small but powerfully resonant thread running through this arc of history. Drawing on detailed archival research and oral interviews, Truth and Revolution skillfully combines social and intellectual history approaches to shed light on both the theory and the practice of STO. Perhaps most famous for its theoretical formulations of white skin privilege, the group also developed a novel analysis of class consciousness that reflected its commitment to an autonomist Marxism. In all the major arenas of its work—factory organizing, anti-imperialist solidarity, anti-nuclear and anti-fascist struggles, among many others—STO combined a strategic assessment of the urgent tasks facing an activist left with a theoretical sophistication that merits sustained attention. Historian Michael Staudenmaier also includes a final chapter linking the legacy of STO directly to the challenges facing twenty-first century radicals.
RSVP and invite people to this event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/849200085115314/
Posted on July 17th, 2015 in Events
Jesse Cohn, author of Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848–2011, will give a talk at People’s Books Cooperative on Sunday, August 2 at 6pm.
About the book: What anarchists demanded from art was what they demanded from all aspects of their political lives: that it should, as much as possible, embody the principle in the practice, the end in the means. While prefiguring a post-revolutionary world, anarchists simultaneously created a richly textured “resistance culture” to sustain their ideals and identities amid everyday lives defined by capital and the state, allowing an escape from domination even while enmeshed in it. Underground Passages investigates and interrogates these creations across the history of the movement. Whether discussing famous artists like John Cage or Diane DiPrima or unknown and anonymous anarchist writers, Cohn shows how aesthetic shifts both reflected and influenced political and economic ones. This is cultural criticism at its best—and most useful.
Learn more about the book here: http://www.akpress.org/underground-passages.html
Posted on July 17th, 2015 in Events
Jesse Cohn, author of Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848–2011, will give a talk at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative on Saturday, August 1 at 7pm.
About the book: What anarchists demanded from art was what they demanded from all aspects of their political lives: that it should, as much as possible, embody the principle in the practice, the end in the means. While prefiguring a post-revolutionary world, anarchists simultaneously created a richly textured “resistance culture” to sustain their ideals and identities amid everyday lives defined by capital and the state, allowing an escape from domination even while enmeshed in it. Underground Passages investigates and interrogates these creations across the history of the movement. Whether discussing famous artists like John Cage or Diane DiPrima or unknown and anonymous anarchist writers, Cohn shows how aesthetic shifts both reflected and influenced political and economic ones. This is cultural criticism at its best—and most useful.
Learn more about the book here: http://www.akpress.org/underground-passages.html
Posted on July 17th, 2015 in Events
Come check out the tables and the workshops! More info at https://torontoanarchistbookfair.wordpress.com/
RSVP and invite people to this event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1669485463279406/
Posted on July 17th, 2015 in Events
Jesse Cohn, author of Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848–2011, will give a talk at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative on Friday, July 31 at 6pm.
About the book: What anarchists demanded from art was what they demanded from all aspects of their political lives: that it should, as much as possible, embody the principle in the practice, the end in the means. While prefiguring a post-revolutionary world, anarchists simultaneously created a richly textured “resistance culture” to sustain their ideals and identities amid everyday lives defined by capital and the state, allowing an escape from domination even while enmeshed in it. Underground Passages investigates and interrogates these creations across the history of the movement. Whether discussing famous artists like John Cage or Diane DiPrima or unknown and anonymous anarchist writers, Cohn shows how aesthetic shifts both reflected and influenced political and economic ones. This is cultural criticism at its best—and most useful.
Learn more about the book here: http://www.akpress.org/underground-passages.html
RSVP or invite people to this event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/137249743275656/
Posted on July 17th, 2015 in Events
Jesse Cohn, author of Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848–2011, will give a talk at Black Bear Bakery on Saturday, July 18 at 3pm.
About the book: What anarchists demanded from art was what they demanded from all aspects of their political lives: that it should, as much as possible, embody the principle in the practice, the end in the means. While prefiguring a post-revolutionary world, anarchists simultaneously created a richly textured “resistance culture” to sustain their ideals and identities amid everyday lives defined by capital and the state, allowing an escape from domination even while enmeshed in it. Underground Passages investigates and interrogates these creations across the history of the movement. Whether discussing famous artists like John Cage or Diane DiPrima or unknown and anonymous anarchist writers, Cohn shows how aesthetic shifts both reflected and influenced political and economic ones. This is cultural criticism at its best—and most useful.
Learn more about the book here: http://www.akpress.org/underground-passages.html
RSVP or invite people to this event on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1094582893905237/
Posted on June 24th, 2015 in Reviews of AK Books
Field Notes From an Archipelago: A Review of Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab (AK Press, 2014), edited by Alexander Reid Ross
by Will Munger
A land and water grab is happening in the canyons and plateaus where I live in rural Utah. Several Canadian corporations backed by transnational investors are moving in to extract tar sands and oil shale on public lands. These outfits are the spear tips of a host of operators who are trying to strip mine the world’s dirtiest oil in the headwaters of the Colorado River, one of North America’s most endangered rivers.
In a region already hit by more than a decade of drought, the mining corporations are drilling deep into underground aquifers to pump water for their processing operations. At the ranch where I work, the springs in the canyon downstream from the initial mine are drying up. The ranching family is one of the first to be impacted by the mine, but there are bigger implications, as waste discharged from the mines will impact more than 30 million people who rely on the Colorado River for drinking water and irrigation.
And then there are the climate change consequences. According to industry backers, there are more potential fossil fuels in the Green River formation that stretches across Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado than the Alberta tar sands. If the infrastructure for these types of megaprojects is completed, there is an almost certainty of being locked in a path toward catastrophic climate change.
With these stunning contradictions in mind, and with all legal options exhausted, local people and climate justice rebels took matters into their own hands in the summer of 2014 by establishing a resistance camp on the mine lease in order to halt mining operations. Amidst a summer of blockades, police repression, and the stresses of day-to-day rural resistance, it’s been a challenge to maintain a global perspective. It’s clear that our fight is being driven by capital and technical knowledge generated through the exploitation of the Alberta tar sands. It’s also clear that there are financiers intending to export these mining operations around the world using corporations deeply tied to the military industrial complex.
But what are the strategic and tactical implications as to how we should carry out our struggle? What are our relationships and responsibilities to other communities fighting exploitative land grabs around the world? How can we use our collective power to fundamentally transform the political and economic structures that facilitate this ecocidal rush?
While thinking through these questions, I came across a copy of Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab. This compilation is billed as an “illustrative field guide to the way people power responds to the global land grab.” It ranges from pieces written by voices new to me, like Yangtze River Delta Earth First!, to long time writers and movement elders, like Grace Lee Boggs, Max Rameau, Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky, and Silvia Federici.
Editor Alexander Reid Ross starts the introduction by describing the global land grab as a contemporary phenomenon where large transnational corporations based in the North Atlantic countries, the Saudi states, and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are grabbing millions of hectares of land from small farmers and indigenous people in Africa, South America, and Asia. By his estimate, the land grabs that have taken place around the world since 2009 would encompass the entire Western United States.
Reid Ross describes five main origins for the global land grab as climate change, financial speculation, the Great Recession, resource scarcity and the ideology of ‘extractivism’1 and the history of colonialism.
This collection is based on a “macro- and microanalysis of land-based struggles in constant tension with the principles and values of capital.” It takes the reader on a far-ranging journey of reading global capital politically by examining the drivers of dispossesive and violent conflict around land use. Grabbing Back is edited in a dialectical manner, weaving between describing the causes of contemporary land struggles as well as introducing us to the people fighting to defend their land and construct ways of life that subvert capital’s logic.
The approach of combining writings from frontline conflicts and academic authors gives the reader a bird’s eye view of the issues as well as a fine-grained picture of reality on the ground. The best articles of the collection are reflections by seasoned organizers and street fighters looking back on recent years of struggle while explaining how their thinking is evolving. AK Press has been putting out several of these sorts of collaborative collections recently, such as Undoing Border Imperialism, Life During Wartime, Uses of a Whirlwind and Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution. Hopefully this publishing trend continues to create intersectional cross-movement dialogs that result in strategic and tactical innovation.
The stories and analysis in Grabbing Back helped contextualize our local struggle in the global flows and dynamics of capital. Coming back to Utah, I’m writing on land that was grabbed from the indigenous Ute barely a century ago. So to what extent is the so-called Global Land Grab a historically unique phenomenon?
According to the collection, what is historically unique is that the forces of capital have encompassed the entire world; the narrative of the powerful is that there is no “outside” and there is no alternative. Yet capital is a dynamic force needing new markets and Grabbing Back describes a current moment defined by new attempts at accumulation. “The global land grab can be circumscribed in three interlocking economic spheres: the foreclosure crisis “freed up” capital to expand agrarian holdings in the Global South, while producing the apparent necessity to buoy up the economy through increased resource extraction in the North and South.”
The analysis in the editor’s introduction describes the links between expanding global agricultural speculation and new pushes to extract unconventional fossil fuels. When it comes to displacing small farmers and indigenous peoples while securing profits for investors, plantation agribusiness and tar sands are different sides of the same coin. The book backs up this claim with well-researched case studies in Ethiopia, Indonesia, Paraguay, and more.
The narrative of global land grabs also helped draw my attention to resistance against neoliberal approaches to mitigating climate change such as carbon markets. For example, a recent investigative article by Nafeez Ahmed describes how carbon trading projects like the World Bank-sponsored conservation program in western Kenya has conducted a relentless scorched earth campaign to evict the 15,000 strong indigenous Sengwer community from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills. The implication is one advanced by indigenous activists at numerous climate summits: our approach to mitigating and adapting to climate change must advance, not destroy, indigenous and poor peoples’ control of their land, water, housing, work, culture, and food systems. As La Via Campesina recently wrote, “a global effort to give small farmers and indigenous communities control over lands is the best hope we have to deal with climate change and feed the world’s growing population.”
So how is it to be done?
Grabbing Back is not a set of policy recommendations aimed at speaking truth to power with the intent of changing the minds of politicians and technocrats. The collection is geared instead toward sharing stories and lessons between grassroots struggles. The book is divided into two sections. “Part One: Struggle in the South” is both an analytic look at the global land grab’s drivers as well as case studies of how this phenomenon is playing out, and being resisted, in Africa, South America, and Asia. Part Two moves to North America where the chapters explore conflicts around foreclosures, disaster response, gentrification, and unconventional fossil fuel extraction like tar sands, fracking, and mountaintop removal.
One of the major contributions of Grabbing Back is sharing stories of current resistance from around the globe. From the Mi’kmaq blockades of fracking operations, to the 2009 overthrow of the government in Madagascar, to the incredible “mass disturbances” of contemporary China, there are certainly revolts, insurrections, and revolutions occurring globally around the question of how people will relate to land and to each other.
As a whole, the collection arcs across an enormous amount of territory and some readers might find the book sprawling and circuitous. The resistance side of the narrative reads like an archipelago, each story its own island and, on the surface, it’s sometimes hard to see the details of what connects them because the described resistances are geographically, culturally, and politically disparate. The challenge and potential of this collection is whether it provides readers with the stories and analysis to understand how they are connected by common enemies: sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete.
Reid Ross proposes in the conclusion that these resistances are “united in attempts to gain popular sovereignty over the machinery that displaces people from their homelands and threatens to wipe out humanity through climate change.”
This is a valid description, and I am still hungry for prescriptive advice. How can we actually stop a tar sands mine from destroying the land we love? How can local communities and movements disrupt the ability of land grabs to take place? How do we learn to practice autogestation, or, as Javier Sethness-Castro, author of Imperiled Life: Revolution Against Climate Catastrophe (AK Press/IAS, 2012) writes in Grabbing Backs forward, “socio-ecological self-management.” How do we combine autogestation with an insurgent practice of militant, massive, direct action against capitalist depredation? Across the archipelago of resistance, how do we learn to act together?
I found the best guidance came from articles written by movement elders whose years of experience is fertile soil to young upstarts like myself. Place-based articles like “A Detroit Story” and “Taking Back The Land” are compelling because of their keen understanding of where their struggle is happening and its inseparability from the historic moment it inhabits. However, there is no prescriptive silver bullet here, no field manual for easy victory. But there is notable insight on how the perspectives of several long-haul radicals have evolved to see intersections between struggles around class, race, gender, land, indigeneity, education, agriculture, and ecology.
Other articles read like field reports from local fights against fossil fuel infrastructure, bank foreclosures, and responding to a climate disaster. To those unfamiliar with these stories, the collection is a solid introduction. To active participants in these struggles, the articles reflect the reality that there is still a great deal of learning and experimenting to happen. My hope is that readers will take from these articles the inspiration to keep fighting and to keep asking each other hard questions.
We are not alone and we are indeed everywhere. We are also just beginning. This is why Grabbing Back ends with an honest acknowledgement that this is an unfinished story.
Get a copy of Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab.
Get a copy of the most recent Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.
Will Munger lives, loves, and works on the Colorado Plateau. He is an editor and contributor to Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency (AK Press, 2013).
Posted on May 15th, 2015 in AK Book Excerpts, AK News
Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South is here!. One of the most exciting things about this book is how well it combines solid (and largely unknown) history with both damn good storytelling and a radical analysis that keeps the contemporary relevance of those stories in continual focus.
Here’s a little taste:
The Stockade Stood Burning:
Rebellion and the convict lease in Tennessee’s Coalfields
On the night of July 14, 1891, in eastern Tennessee, a band of about one hundred armed coal miners and local citizens marched on a newly built prison stockade owned by the Tennessee Coal Mining Company. The miners and their allies compelled the guards to release the forty inmates imprisoned there, put them on a train, and sent them to Knoxville. Without firing a shot, the miners disappeared back into the darkness.[1] Over the next thirteen months, the workers would repeat this scene over and over, eventually torching company property, looting company stores, and aiding the prisoners’ escapes. The miners were rebelling against the use of convict labor in Tennessee mines, which was being used to cut company costs and disastrously undermine the employment prospects and solidarity of free laborers. In the words of the president of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, “We were right in calculating that the free laborers would be loath to enter upon strikes when they saw that the company was amply provided with convict labor.”[2] But, as David Oshinsky writes in his book about the development of early southern prison systems:
Something happened in Tennessee, something almost unimaginable to the mine owners and politicians of that State. When the companies tried to intimidate their workers by bringing in convict labor to take over their jobs, the workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains bound for Nashville and Knoxville and places far away.
What began as an isolated protest in the company town of Coal Creek spread quickly across the Cumberlands to engulf most of eastern Tennessee. Thousands of miners took part in these uprisings, and thousands of armed State guardsmen were sent to face them down. The Tennessee convict war was one of the largest insurrections in American working-class history. And yet, unfolding at exactly the same time as the more publicized labor wars in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, it was largely ignored.[3]
At a time when the post–Civil War South was trying to reinvent its economy, penal institutions, and racial caste system, the actions of the miners and their allies, combined with the resistance of convicts, created a perfect storm. Within a couple of years of the rebellion’s beginning, it was clear that the brutal system of convict leasing, by which state and county prisoners were literally sold off to private railroad and coal companies, had become totally unsustainable. Again and again, all across eastern and mid-Tennessee, miners released prisoners and burned company property to the ground. The costs of militiamen needed to guard the prisoners, along with the sabotage, work slow-downs, and rebellions by the convicts, made the system cost-prohibitive both to the state and coal companies. By December 31, 1895, Tennessee became the first state in the South to abolish the tremendously lucrative convict lease.
The convict wars symbolized the continually violent transition of chattel to wage slavery in the South, in terms of both the southern states’ attempts to industrialize as well as in the violent reactions of a newly industrialized proletariat to such efforts. Miners’ participation in this insurrection also catalyzed a change in the thinking of many poor whites, who went from using forms of rhetoric traditional to a Jeffersonian Republic and commonwealth to those of class war. As shown by both the wildcats of the 1960s and ’70s and the modern resistance to mountaintop removal mining, an uneasy combination of these different modes of thinking still remains in Appalachia to this day, creating the potential for movements that are at once quintessentially American yet simultaneously radical, violent, and autonomous in nature.
The convict lease sought to preserve the benefits of enslaved Black labor in the “New South.” This insurrection can therefore be seen as an indirect assault by white and Black miners upon older notions of white identity and loyalty to the racial caste system. Though this form of race treason never became more than a secondary factor in the miners’ economic self-defense, it would be wrong not to consider the meanings of such a self-interested racial solidarity, particularly at a time when the racist prison-industrial complex has now grown to such gargantuan proportions, and neoliberalism has eliminated so many of the industrial manufacturing jobs once occupied by white workers. For those of us interested in kindling future insurrections, there are many things worth considering in the convict wars.
1 Karin A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 79–81.
2 Ibid., 45.
3 David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996), 81–82.
[Get your copy here.]
