Yes, Publishers Weekly, we think Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? is great, too.

Posted on September 13th, 2011 in Reviews of AK Books

We are very excited about Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s new edited collection Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, (available February 2012), and apparently so is Publishers Weekly, because they’ve written a glowing review, far in advance of the title’s appearance.

Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? celebrates the history of a vibrant and dynamic queer culture, and laments the loss of its exhilarating fabulousness to make way for a more corporate-cozy version of itself. But more importantly, as our mothers now watch Ellen and our friends get gay married on Bridezillas (and it’s just as bland as anything else on TV), Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? is an attempt to reclaim that thriving and flamboyant subculture and challenge assimilationist norms with its defiant faggotry!

Read the review, which appeared in the September 12th print and online issue of  Publishers Weekly, and make sure to check out the book when it comes out in February. We can hardly wait!

Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform

A distinctive collection of essays by gay and transgender activists, performance artists, and scholars embraces the subversive aspects of queer identity and rails against its “sanitized, straight-friendly version.” Some essays are personal observations of lives on the margins, such as Ezra RedEagle Whitman’s attempts to reconcile his homosexuality with Native American conceptions of manliness, or Booh Edouardo’s experiences as an autistic transgender man interacting with mainstream gay peers. Others focus more on general trends in gay culture, such as Michael J. Faris and ML Sugie’s discussion of racial preferences and prejudices on hookup sites, or George Ayala and Patrick Hebert’s examination of the role of the arts in building community among HIV positive men. Some stories are disheartening, like Matthew Blanchard’s reflections on his hospitalization and disfigurement after many years of drug-fueled indiscriminate, unsafe sex. Others are much more hopeful, like Kristen Stoeckeler’s observations on drag queen and king performers and their playful yet serious blurring of the lines between male and female. Just as the battle for LGBTQ civil rights continues, these essays—alternately moving and sprightly, contemplative and outraged—display the power of presenting an alternative to the mainstream: a world of greater tolerance, acceptance, support, and creativity. (Feb.)

Colonialism Is Back. In Fact, It Never Left.

Posted on September 9th, 2011 in Reviews of AK Books

Jared Ball’s amazing mixtape manifesto, I Mix What I Like!, continues to garner accolades from scholars, musicians, reviewers, and etc. You can find all of the book’s recent press hits on Jared’s blog, updated daily at imixwhatilike.com. But one of the most exciting recent reviews the book has received is this one below, written by Juliana “Jewels” Smith, PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, and friend of the collective. Jewels’ review is great; she highlights a lot of the important and compelling aspects of Jared’s arguments–what drew us to this manuscript in the first place–but she also offers a nuanced and balanced critique of the avenues that the book doesn’t explore. We’re thrilled to have her permission to post the review here, and we encourage all of you to repost it widely!

Colonialism is Back—In Fact, It Never Left

A Review of Jared Ball’s I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto

Jared Ball’s work exists in multiplicity: as radio show host on WPFW, a professor of Communications at Morgan State, and a journalist for the Black Agenda Report and his own mix radio show, Voxuion.com.  And much like his work, his new book, I Mix What I Like is equally expansive.  Taking on mass media for his subject matter, Ball looks specifically at radio and journalism, as mediums that determine our communication, consciousness, and ideas.  As Ball says in an interview, the idea behind the book is that “the mixtape, as hip-hop’s original mass medium, its national medium, is itself an extension of and response to the continuing colonization of African America. And to the extent that there is a ‘hip-hop nation,’ it too is, naturally, an internally-held colony.”[i]

Ball wants the reader to understand that Black communities in the U.S. are internal colonies, which is to say that there is built-in structural inequality that accounts for the disproportionate distribution of resources in music.  In the chapter, “The Colonized Rhythm Nation,” he writes,

Black music—as a raw –material natural resource—has always been and continues to be a powerful component of the larger political economy…which works Black people under “plantation-like conditions” for a hip hop industry that produces “aggregate worldwide revenues” of at least $40 billion a year.  These conditions exist because the fundamental relationship remains fully intact.  It is not simply a matter of analogy. (26)

(more…)

Looking for Labor Day: A review of Immanuel Ness’s new book

Posted on September 8th, 2011 in AK Authors!, AK Distribution, Recommended Reading, Reviews, Uncategorized

AK Press’s Oakland warehouse recently hosted a small event to celebrate a new book by our comrade Immanuel Ness, called Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present, published earlier this year by Haymarket Books. In attendance was Bay Area anarchist & organizer, Bernard Marszalek, editor of AK/Kerr Company’s new release of Paul Lafargue’s The Right to be Lazy. After the event, Bernard decided to write a short review of the book in honor of “Labor” Day, which is, as we all know, a bit of a sham holiday, and now we repost it here from his Right to be Lazy Blog. Enjoy! And be sure to check the book out, too!

A Review of Ours to Master and to Own, Immanuel Ness and Dario Azellini (Haymarket Books, 2011)

Ness and Azellini have edited a splendid collection of essays covering the history, theory and practice of workers’ control.(1) Beginning with the Paris Commune in 1871(2) to the most recent factory takeovers in South America, this collection is superb. At over 400 pages it is hard to fault some of the missing history, for instance, of Hungary in 1956(3) and France in 1968. The theoretical exposition is clearly written and certainly informative. This book fills a gap in the published record of revolutionary activity and proves, through its coverage, its central theme – worker takeovers of the “means of production” in times of crisis appears to be almost a natural response to repression.

That said, the haunting suspicion for me is that this collection borders on the gratuitous, because it fails to deal with the question of the relevance of workers’ control for today’s struggles. No one can deny that the history of class warfare can instruct in the methods people have adopted to meet their demands and in so doing provide a vision of a better society. But the peasant revolts in the Middle Ages can inspire us and, even before that period, so to can the slave revolts in antiquity. So, while the inspiration may be valuable, the relevancy of distant struggles needs to be questioned. And, as history has speeded up for us, those workers’ battles only several generations removed from the present, seem like distant ancient history.

To speak of workers’ control brings to mind those ancient factories where thousands of workers toiled at furnaces smelting iron, or building ships, or any number of industrial jobs. These were Marx’s army of the proletarians, brought together for no other purpose than to enrich the capitalists, but who once so conjoined became an explosive force threatening the capitalist order, especially by simply withholding their labor – the General Strike.

In a world of baristas, data-entry drones and endless cubicle warmers in all manner of enterprises, it’s hard to see what power over their bosses these workers possess. But it gets worse. When we look around today at the rebellions all over North Africa, in various European capitals and now beginning to emerge in South America (in Chile) what do we see? Who is fighting the effects of neo-liberalism? It is of course the youth – the youth with no prospects for an economic future.

How does the struggle of workers at the height of industrial expansion relate to young people who fear that they may never have a stable job – the Precariat (The New Dangerous Class)?(4) That there is no reference to the precariat in Ours to Master and to Own is an unfortunate missed opportunity to explore the book’s thesis – that worker rebellions erupted like clockwork throughout the two hundred years of industrial capitalism – in a new world. Is this workers’ history now coming to an end in the formerly industrialized North? Will the new workers’ struggles occur only in China, and maybe a handful of other emerging nations?

And most interestingly, will the first “workers rebellion” covered in this book – the Paris Commune, involving all strata of the city – be more like the template for future insurrections?(5) The editors contemplate a second volume to accompany this one and we can only hope that some of these issues are dealt with there.

The Smell of Money: Alberta’s Tar Sands

Posted on September 7th, 2011 in AK Authors!, AK Book Excerpts, Current Events

Many of you are no doubt aware of the recent Tar Sands Action in Washington, D.C. that culminated in over 1,250 arrests, and the battle against the Keystone XL pipeline rages on. In this time of dirty energy and even dirtier money, the seasoned organizers and researchers included in our massive 2010 release Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution are voices we should all turn to as we consider sane, sustainable alternatives to the capitalist energy system that is currently wreaking havoc on the environment.

As Raj Patel says, this is “a vital anthology for anyone who wants to understand both the roots of the energy crisis, and the flourishing radical resistance that offers a sustainable future beyond capitalism.” Order your copy of Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution today to learn more about the tar sands as well as the many other dynamic (and essential) struggles going on within the energy sector.

Below, you’ll find a short excerpt from one of the pieces in Sparking examining the tar sands question, by Shannon Walsh and Macdonald Stainsby. Be sure to get a copy of the book to read the whole piece, and many more!

Excerpt from “The Smell of Money: Alberta’s Tar Sands”

Shannon Walsh and Macdonald Stainsby

Published in Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution:
Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World (AK Press 2010)

There is no environmental minister on earth who can stop the oil from coming out of the sand, because the money is too big.
—Stéphane Dion, former Canadian Federal Minister of Environment

At Syncrude’s Wood Bison Viewpoint, thirty-five km north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, visitors usually first stop to take photos of the carbon-spewing smoke stacks puffing away at the refinery in the near distance before turning their lenses to the grazing bison on “reclaimed” Syncrude land. Syncrude Canada Ltd. is the largest producer of synthetic crude oil in the world, and one of the oldest companies in Alberta’s oil patch, producing 111 million barrels of oil in 2007 alone. On a cold afternoon in March, visitors from Ontario, California, Edmonton, Newfoundland, and India pocket their cameras and tread carefully across the deep snow to catch a glimpse of Syncrude’s famous imported bison grazing on reclaimed land a stone’s throw from the refineries.

The land is not exactly boreal forest, with commercial trees, long grasses, and maintained animals being fed on hay that a local bus driver said he saw being hauled in by truck up Highway 63. The bison, once endemic to the region, have been re-introduced to this patch of reclaimed land with much fanfare. “That’s the deal they made with the natives,” proclaims an enthusiastic Newfoundlander to his visiting family as they gaze out over the snow at four or five bison casting little black shadows on the white fields, “to put this land back the way it was.”

“As long as the buffalo can live here, anything can live here,” he explained.

This is ground zero of tar sands development and about as soaked in contradiction as could be expected from what has been coined the largest industrial project in human history—and perhaps the largest environmental catastrophe on the planet right now.

You don’t have to look much further than Canada’s tar sands to see the petroleum economy spiraling out of control, and with a changing political and economic context for oil production being heralded in, the boom seems to only be changing form.

Peak Oil, Climate Change, and Water Scarcity: An Unholy Trinity In the Tar Sands

Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert’s Peak—that peak oil moment— whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.
—Mike Davis

The world consumes 86 million barrels of oil a day—over a billion barrels every 12 days. But very few new oil deposits have been found. For every barrel of oil we now discover, we consume approximately six. The connection between peak oil, climate change, and the oil rush in Alberta is undeniable. The link to capital is both an obvious and complex story to tell.

While many mainstream environmentalists have welcomed high oil prices in the hopes that it will force market-led solutions to tackle climate change and petrol-economics, it is increasingly clear that rather than the market rising up to develop solutions for climate change, prompted by dwindling oil resources (such as rethinking hyper-consumptive lifestyles), it is advancing in just the opposite direction, attempting to squeeze oil out of the most untenable of regions with gross environmental and human consequences. At the moment we are witnessing what can only be described as the irrational, frantic push of market-forces in their most naked form, precisely at a time where reductions and radical transformation is required.

The tar sands are a case study in the way that the deregulated marketplace so completely spirals out of control. Market-based logics depending solely on self-interest will inevitably come in violent opposition with the very ability of humanity to live. All rational logic has been set aside for the steel arm of the market to generate solutions. While government regulations exist, as the Assistant Deputy Minister of the Oil Sands Division of Alberta Environment Jay Nagendren described, it is the market that directs the Environment Ministry, not the environment. Nagendren explained,

The premier has said that market forces will dictate the pace of development. So our job is, given that labor forces and finance will decide what kind of conditions need to be set in terms of the cumulative effects, to decide what kind of caps we will have to place on emissions, what kind of restrictions on water use, carbon capture storage, reclamation, tailings ponds, water use, etc.

The role of government to create a resistance to the excesses of capital is clearly not at play in the oil patch. The tar sands presents a gruesome yet succinct reflection of David Harvey’s (2006) ideas of uneven geographical development, as it activates the conditionalities around “the material embedding of capital accumulation processes in the web of social-ecological life.” What we are witnessing here is a capitalist push towards a total separation between the market’s abstract and self-sustaining logic, and the social-ecological realities of our own life-worlds. This disconnect is critically important, we think, at this particular moment in history when the balance between peak oil, climate change, and water shortages hang in a dangerous trinity, effecting the very bare life of most of the planet’s population (read here, the expanded impacts on agriculture, food shortages, mass displacement, and migration due to ecological disaster, labor migration to these frontiers of capital, droughts and flooding, effective access to food and safe drinking water, etc.).

This material embedding of capital into our ecological life-worlds is crucially important, especially since many of the environmentalist challenges to climate change use “green capitalist” logics as a frame for post-petrol arguments. When market-utopias take over completely, as we are seeing in the tar sands, its gross excesses become very difficult to curb. The absurdity of reclamation plans in the tar sands, currently approved by government, actually purport to reconstruct entire ecosystems with technologies that are still being developed (there is, of course, faith that the market will succeed in developing in some ever-evolving future). They are market-utopias at their most extreme. Boreal forest is “reclaimed” in terms of “equivalent values,” which in a recent case has meant that 40 percent of disturbed land must be returned to “commercial forest capabilities,” effectively creating a natural environment of harvestable reconstructed commercial forest and artificial lakes. It’s an absurdist creation only possible at this point in market-utopian logics.

The truth is that as the world runs out of oil, fresh water is also quickly drying up. Available fresh water represents less than half of 1 percent of the world’s total water stock. Many analysts on both sides of the fence, from the World Bank to the Polaris Institute, believe that, by 2025, we will be living in an era of serious water scarcity and water shortages across the globe. The logical incongruity between the pillage of water through the lust for money cannot be more apt. The realities of an impending water crisis impel us to seriously challenge market-led logics within industry and government before it is too late. Green capitalism is most certainly not going to lead us out of what is, ultimately, a market-driven, capital induced crisis.

The tar sands can only be seen as evidence of an untenable state of denial and psychoses around market-based, petrol-energy dependence. Some of the many serious and cumulative human and environmental impacts deserve a brief recounting here:

• Pipeline and refinery projects that cut straight through indigenous land throughout the continent, with serious social, ecological, sovereignty, and health implications for indigenous people, including the construction of the Mackenzie Gas Project, which will bring natural gas from the Arctic straight through unceded Dehcho First Nation territory;

• Health and human impacts of those living in the region of the developments, including the appearance of rare forms of cancers;

• Depleting large amounts of cleaner energy, natural gas, to produce dirty crude, what some call “turning gold into lead”;

• Intensive carbon production and adding to climate change;

• Creating new systems of migration of wealth and bodies through trade, resources, and labor agreements, including proposals for thousands of new temporary foreign workers, who will not even be allowed to apply for landed immigrant status;

• Depleting fresh water at a time of increasing fresh water scarcity by drawing off the Athabasca river, whose water system accounts for 25 percent of the fresh water sources in North America;

• Supplying oil for the military industrial project, given that the Pentagon consumes about 85 percent of the oil used by the US government;

• Impacts on fish and wildlife, including the destruction of thousands of hectares of boreal forest and muskeg that acts as an essential “sponge” for water that flows throughout the region.

Perhaps most disconcerting is that most of the tar sands oil ends up as dirty crude, and at the other end of its cycle puffs its way back into the atmosphere out the tailpipes of North American planes, cars, and military vehicles. As Mike Davis (2008) writes, there is a madness to creating a more carbon-intensive process at the very moment when we urgently need to reduce emissions:

Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora’s box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of “energy independence”) is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance “humankind’s ability to accelerate global warming” and slow the urgent transition to “non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles.”

US president Barack Obama has quickly stepped onto the train of Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), touted by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach as the technological quick fix to the massive carbon emissions issues in the American coal and Alberta oil industries. In fact, Carbon Capture and Sequestration is not a proven technology, is extremely expensive to develop, and has a very limited potential to sequester the carbon emissions that come from tar sands extraction;10 by some estimates it would only capture 10 percent of tar sands emissions.

“I think to the extent that Canada and the United States can collaborate on ways that we can sequester carbon, capture greenhouse gases before they’re emitted into the atmosphere, that’s going to be good for everybody,” President Obama told CBC chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge. “Because if we don’t, then we’re going to have a ceiling at some point in terms of our ability to expand our economies and maintain the standard of living that’s so important.”

But there is a ceiling to growth. While this largely unproven technology would bury harmful emissions underground, we would still be left with more exploitation of the tar sands, more depletion of fresh water and natural gas, and more devastation of the boreal forest. As Gerald Butts writes, this technological optimism is like telling our kids “keep smoking—we need the tax revenue. Trust us, we will cure cancer by the time you get it.”

It is starkly clear that there is no just and sustainable way to continue living in a petroleum-based economy. The harsh truth remains that the only alternative is a radical rethink of the way that we live, including a serious challenge to capitalism itself.

Please get in touch with us directly by e-mail if you are interested in copies of this book for wholesale or for review.

Half-Price AK Press Titles: Back In Action!

Posted on September 2nd, 2011 in AK Distribution, AK News

Hey folks, remember how we used to pick out a handful of awesome AK Press titles each month and discount them by 50%? Well, we haven’t forgotten about that. Here we are, at it once again! The following titles are 50% off regular list prices throughout the month of September. Get em while they’re hot! (Okay, we think they’re always hot, but get ’em while they’re cheap too!)

—

Animal Ingredients, A to Z
By E.G. Smith Collective

An essential guide for vegetarians, vegans, the health conscious, and caring consumers. As well as a comprehensive listing of animal ingredients, this easy to navigate book contains supplemental information on vegan nutrition, food alternatives, and contact information for animal advocacy groups.
Now just $5.98!

Disaster and Resistance: Comics and Landscapes for the 21st Century
By Seth Tobocman

Disaster and Resistance outlines pressing social and political struggles at the dawn of the twenty-first century—from post 9-11 New York City, to Israel and Palestine, to Iraq and New Orleans. In his bold comic style, Seth chronicles events as they happen, musing not on the chaos of instability and fear, but on the struggle against it.
Now just $10.00!

The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism
By Barry Sanders

This investigation examines in detail the environmental impact of US military practices. Based on research culled from documents released or leaked by the military, The Green Zone names military activity—from fuel emissions to radioactive waste to defoliation campaigns—as the single-greatest contributor to the worldwide environmental crisis.
Now just $7.48!

Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel
By Nunzio Pernicone

This story of Tresca’s life―as editor, labor agitator, anarchist, anti-communist, street fighter, and opponent of fascism―illuminates the lost world of Italian-American radicalism. From his work on behalf of the IWW, to his editorship of numerous papers, and his assassination on the streets of New York City, Tresca’s passion left a permanent mark on the American map.
Now just $9.98!

Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States
By Jules Boykoff

Despite the pretense of democratic ideals, the US government has ruthlessly suppressed dissent, using hard-to-detect and rarely acknowledged tactics. Focusing on the histories of a variety of movements for political, social, and economic change in the US, Jules Boykoff shows the specific tools used by government agents to undermine the long-term viability of opposition in this country.
Now just $10.98!

Mountain Justice: Homegrown Resistance to Mountaintop Removal, for the Future of Us All
By Trisha Shapiro

In recent years, communities fighting against mountaintop removal and the destruction of their homes in Appalachia have invited volunteers from outside the coalfields to help them bring national attention to this shameful practice, and abolish it. Mountain Justice is an insider report of this ongoing grassroots struggle.
Now just $8.98!

Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity
By Dan Berger
This book brings to life America’s most famous renegades, the Weather Underground. Based on original research, it is a gripping account of the actions and motivations of the group of white people who risked everything to oppose war and racism. At the same time, it provides a nuanced and critically engaged study demonstrating the Weather Underground’s contemporary significance.
Now just $10.00!

Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917
By Terrence Kissack

Terence Kissack expands the scope of the history of LGBT politics in the United States. The anarchists Kissack examines—such as Emma Goldman, Benjamin Tucker, and Alexander Berkman—defended the right of individuals to pursue same-sex relations, often challenging the conservative beliefs of their fellow anarchists as well as many outside the movement.
Now just $8.98!

Wayne Price reviews Cindy Milstein’s Anarchism and Its Aspirations on Anarkismo.net

Posted on August 29th, 2011 in Uncategorized

Cindy Milstein’s Anarchism and Its Aspirations, the first title in the Anarchist Interventions Series co-published with the Institute for Anarchist Studies is quickly becoming a classic introductory text on anarchism, and a staple for those who are already committed to the struggle against the state and capital.

Like everything we publish, we hope that Anarchism and Its Aspirations will not only become an important and useful part of the anarchist canon, but that it will continue to push forward the conversation about how we should go about doing this thing we call anarchism. In that regard, we love to see/hear/read people talking in a thoughtful way about our titles. It’s the conversations started by criticism that keeps us thinking, moving forward and refining our visions.

Hopefully the criticisms that Wayne Price (thoughtfully and respectfully) offers below of Milstein’s book will do just that.

Check out the original posting at Anarkismo.net.

The Ethical Anarchism of Cindy Milstein

Review of Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations (2010), Oakland CA: AK Press.

Review of book by Cindy Milstein, providing an overview of the anarchist movement at this moment, as she sees it. The review gives a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of her ethical approach to anarchism.

Cindy Milstein is a speaker and writer who is well-known to US anarchists. There seems to be hardly an anarchist conference or bookfair which she does not speak at and usually has been involved in organizing. Her rapid-fire speech is as well-known as her open-mindedness and friendliness to people from all trends within anarchism. She is also prominent as a former student of Murray Bookchin (1921—2006). Coming out of the anarchist-communist tradition, he was extremely influential. This book is a reworked collection of a few of her essays. It serves as both an introduction to anarchism and an overview of the current state of the anarchist movement (community, milieu, or whatever)—as she sees it.

There is much to like about this little book. While Milstein is Bookchin’s follower in many ways, she does not continue his method of discussion. Bookchin was famous for drawing sharp lines between his views and others, such as “deep ecology” or what he called “life-style anarchism” (Bookchin, 1995). He attacked these opposing views vituperatively and intemperately, despite the fact that his opponents agreed with his goals. Milstein, on the contrary, believes “Anarchists attempt to find harmony in dissonance…” (p. 64). She seeks to include all trends within anarchism. “Anarchism…is a way of asking the right questions without seeking a monopoly on the right answers” (p. 73).

However this also may be somewhat of a weakness. On life or death questions, during a revolution, say, there may be only one right answer, or at least only one thing that can be done. After so many failed revolutions (Spain being only the most famous), we cannot be so cavalier about trying to have the right answers. Milstein does not suppress her own views on issues in dispute, but she does not bring out what the inter-anarchist disputes are about and what each side has to say. Since I disagree with her on several points, I find this unfortunate.

Anarchism’s Moral Vision

Her approach to anarchism is based on ethics, ideals, a moral vision. “I firmly believe in the expansive ethical sensibility that has marked anarchism as a tradition” (p. 3). “Communism’s overarching project is to ensure the communal good” (p. 13). “Ethics still animate anarchism, supplying what’s most compelling about it in praxis….From the outset, anarchism grounded itself in a set of shared values” (p. 25).

This approach is superior to that of Marxism. While Marx’s work is drenched in moral passion, this is not expressed in his theory. You can read shelves of Marx’s works (and I have) without finding a statement that “communism seeks the communal good” or that people “should” be for socialism (communism). Socialism is seen as something that will happen, replacing capitalism, without giving reasons why we should be for it. At most, Marx and Engels expressed an alternative, “ruin or revolution,” or “socialism or barbarism” (in Luxemburg’s phrase)—but not why we should chose socialist revolution over ruin (which may seem obvious but remains a moral choice).

Historically anarchism is rooted in a moral critique of capitalist society and an ideal vision of a new society of freedom, equality, solidarity, and justice. Milstein is quite right to focus on this, as did Bookchin, her mentor. The problem occurs when a theory is limited to a moral-only approach. Yes, libertarian communism is good, communally and individually, but how can it come about? What can we do, strategically, to create it? What are the social agencies that can create socialism? Instead of “the proletariat” or “the wretched of the earth,” Milstein and other Bookchinites believe that social change will be brought about by good people, citizens, “people capable of sustaining a new society” (p. 69), ignoring class or background.

To his credit, Marx created a theory of how capitalism works, what trends in it are moving toward socialism and what are moving against it (towards barbarism). What is the social force to create the new society? Marx believed in the centrality of the working class created by capitalism, a collective agency brought together by modern industry and modern cities, pushed to become aware of our oppression and to revolt against it. He saw workers as a leading grouping in an alliance with other oppressed groupings of people.

Anarchists disagreed with much of Marx’s program: the transitional state, centralized economy, and electoral strategy. But Milstein notes that the “classical anarchists” also “looked to forms of worker-oriented socialism” (p. 27). She reports this as a historical fact, but does not discuss why they did this.

Bookchin fiercely rejected the idea of the revolutionary potential of the modern working class (see “Listen Marxist!”; in Bookchin, 1986). He noted the nonrevolutionary consciousness of most workers today—which is true (for now), but is also true of the whole population (the majority of which is working class).

Milstein does not repeat Bookchin’s denunciation of “proletarian socialism.” But she distinguishes between “classical anarchism” and “renewed anarchism.” This is another version of the two trends in modern anarchism, as expressed by Uri Gordon, David Graeber, and others (Price, 2009). By “classical anarchism” she means what Schmidt & van der Walt (2009) call “the broad anarchist tradition.” Classical anarchism, she claims, suffered from “a workerist orientation…” (p. 83). She does not explain what she means by “workerism” or why she rejects it. Instead she mentions five influences on “renewed anarchism,” none of which include workplace struggle among their efforts. (The broad anarchist tradition included those who combined working class struggles with nonclass issues of gender, nationality, etc. Unfortunately it also included those who wrongly had a wooden class-only approach. But supporting nonclass struggles does not require rejecting the importance of workers’ struggles.)

Rather, she notes, “Bookchin’s writings pointed to the city or neighborhood as the site of struggle, radicalization, dual power, and finally revolution…” (p. 84). I am all for community organizing, but the community—by itself—does not have the potential oppositional power of occupied workplaces in a general strike, of shutting down an economy—and of starting it up in a different way. Bookchin carried his views out to the end, to advocating an electoralist strategy of seeking to get his followers elected to local governments (cities, counties, or towns). There they were supposed to use the local state structures to create libertarian communism (Biehl, 1998). This was an unrealistic reformist scheme (Milstein does not raise it).

Anarchist Strategy

While many anarchists simply reject the insights of Marx, Milstein believes that his work is useful for anarchists. “More than anyone, Karl Marx grasped the essential character of what would become a hegemonic social structure—articulated most compellingly in his Capital…” (p. 21). She refers favorably to Marx’s explanation of the commodification of society under capitalism. But she does not refer to the way he describes capitalism as creating the working class as a collective agent in the process of production.

Also, she misstates the nature of economic “value,” the foundation of prices, in Marx’s theory. She writes, “‘Value’ is determined by how much one has to exchange and accumulate: money, property, or especially power over others” (p. 21). Not at all. To Marx, “exchange value” is the socially necessary labor time spent in producing a commodity (that is, it is as if the commodity embodies the labor spent in making it). Consistent with the rest of her perspective, she leaves out the importance of the worker in creating capitalist value.

It is the workers who most directly feel the oppression of the capitalists on their backs, so to speak. Therefore the workers are most likely to resist the oppression of the capitalists. At least, more likely than bank managers, farmers, or police officers. In any case, the workers, at the very site of exploitation, are in a better position to resist capitalist oppression than are “citizens” randomly selected from various classes.

And the working class—as a class—overlaps with all other oppressed groups: women, GLBT people, People of Color, oppressed nations, prisoners, etc. That these oppressions must also be fought does not mean that class exploitation should be ignored. Quite the contrary. The greatest revolutionary potential is where class and nonclass oppressions overlap (as with Black women workers).

Milstein’s Strategy

Similar to other advocates of a “new” or “renewed” anarchism. Milstein does raise a strategy. “…Small-scale projects—from bike cooperatives to free schools…[contain] the kernels of destroying the current vertical social arrangements” (p. 15). “The idea is that people establish counterinstitutions as well as lifeways that gain enough force…to ultimately exist on a level with, or finally in victorious contestation to, centralized power” (p. 46). She is also for direct action and demonstrations, but this seems to be the center of her strategy. This is not really a “new” strategy. It goes back to Proudhon’s mutualism (a credit union of sorts which would grow to peacefully replace capitalism and the state). He counterposed this to building labor unions or to aiming for a revolution.

Milstein does not discuss the “classical” criticism of this strategy, let along refute it. The problem—then and now—is that the capitalist class rules the state and, obviously, the market. Alternate institutions are only allowed to exist at the margins. Here they either fail or succeed, in which case they are integrated into the hierarchical society (there are plenty of successful coops, but they are no threat to capitalism). But what if alternate institutions did become threats to the established institutions? What if anarchist-led cooperatives threatened to replace the giant corporations which produce steel or autos or gasoline (which is…unlikely!). Then the other businesses would boycott the cooperatives, deny them loans, refuse to let them use the transport system. The state would raise their taxes, pass impossible-to-follow regulations, or just outlaw them.

This is not a criticism of building cooperatives or living in a bohemian style. These may be good in themselves. But they are not a suffient strategy for changing society. In short, there is no alternative to the “classical” anarchist revolutionary strategy of building popular movements, among the workers and all oppressed groups, prefiguring the future by being as democratic as possible in the mass organizations, fighting against the bosses and all oppressions—aiming for an eventual insurrection of the working class and all the oppressed.

Milstein’s focus on ethics is absolutely correct. In particular I like her commitment to democracy (direct democracy), which many anarchists reject. But we do not have to choose between values and a materialistic analysis of how capitalism works and how it can be challenged. Whatever Marx—or Bookchin—thought, these are not incompatible perspectives. A moral analysis can show us the goal and cause us to reject the current system. A materialistic analysis can offer guidance as to which forces are going in a libertarian direction and which are moving in a regressive direction. And morality can, again, guide us in deciding which to choose. That is a discussion and a decision. Cindy Milstein’s book is a valuable contribution to that discussion.

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References

Biehl, Janet, with Bookchin, Murray (1998). The Politics of Social Ecology; Libertarian Municipalism. Montreal/NYC: Black Rose Books.

Bookchin, Murray (1986). Post-Scarcity Anarchism (2nd ed.). Montreal/Buffalo NY: Black Rose Books.

Bookchin, Murray (1995). Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Edinburgh, Scotland/San Francisco CA: AK Press.

Price, Wayne (2009). “The two main trends in anarchism.” http://www.anarkismo.net/article/13536

Schmidt, Michael, & van der Walt, Lucien (2009). Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism; vol. 1. Oakland CA: AK Press.

written for www. Anarkismo.net

Also check out these other titles in the Anarchist Interventions Series:

Oppose and Propose: Lessons from Movement for a New Society

By Andrew Cornell

ISBN: 978-1-84935-066-2

$12   |   Available now!

Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle

By Maia Ramnath

ISBN: 978-1-84935-082-2

$16   |   Available December 2011!

The Back to School Sale is still ON!

Posted on August 27th, 2011 in AK News, Happenings, Uncategorized

Be Our Friend… With Benefits.

Friends of AK Press With so many great books on the horizon, there’s no time like the present to become a Friend of AK Press! It’s a great way to support AK Press’s publishing work, and in return you get every new book we publish, delivered right to you. Sign up now, and get a stylish tote bag featuring the Friends of AK logo designed by Josh MacPhee! If you’re already a Friend, just refer someone else, and if they mention you when they sign up, you’ll both get a tote bag. And that’s not all-if you keep referring more people after your first, you’ll get a $20 AK Press gift certificate for each additional new Friend you sign up!

You Heard It Here First: AK’s Fall/Winter 2011 List!

Posted on August 23rd, 2011 in About AK, AK Authors!, AK Distribution, AK News, Recommended Reading, Uncategorized

Here it is folks: a preview of the amazing shit you can expect to see out from AK Press in late 2011 and early 2012. I think this is a fascinating season; there’s some real surprises in there (seriously, I’m surprised at how this list came together, and I was involved in acquiring some of these books!), all of them welcome ones, if I do say so myself, and there are some interesting trends that emerge. It’s a nice blend of more forward-thinking social and political analysis of the present-day, and strong historical titles that make clear our commitment as a publisher to preserving, and expanding our understanding of, our anarchist and radical past.

Plus, covers by some of our favorite designers: John Yates did a phenomenal job on the cover for Haymarket Scrapbook and Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots! And Josh MacPhee‘s cover for Anarchism and Workers’ Self Management has some of the best lettering we’ve seen in a long time … and it’s a collage! How cool is that? Plus, one by a new addition to our stable of designers (but an old friend to many in the collective), the incredibly-talented Tim Simons, who also designed the cover for Ramor Ryan’s new one, Zapatista Spring. We’re definitely experimenting with different styles (and colors, and trim-sizes, and paper), and having a hell of a lot of fun while doing it!

The books won’t be available for preorder on our site for a while (though you can always preorder at Amazon … yeah, I said it.), but click on any cover to download a handy-dandy onesheet with more info on the book, and join the AK mailing list to get updates and announcement when books do become available. And, stores and wholesale customers can contact Suzanne (sales@akpress.org) to place advance orders, or preorder through Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and our trade distributor, Consortium Sales & Distribution. Media and interviewers can contact Jessica (publicity@akpress.org) to request advance reader copies. And, if you’ve got an idea for a book for an upcoming season, well, be sure to send that on to the publishing department (publishing@akpress.org)!

	Eyes to the South: French Anarchists and Algeria, by David PorterOctober 2011 | $25.00 Eyes to the South studies the currents of the Algerian revolution alongside the development of French anarchist thought from the 1950s to the present. Read More … Cover design by Josh MacPhee
	A Colossal Wreck: American Diaries from the Time of Clinton to Obama, by Alexander Cockburn October 2011 | $24.95 In these stunning new diaries, political journalist Alexander Cockburn paints the vast and tragic-comic canvas of America’s descent to what Percy Shelley in his poem “Ozymandias” invoked as “that colossal wreck” of empire. Read More … Cover design by Counterpunch
	The Haymarket Scrapbook: The 25th Anniversary Edition, edited by David Roediger and Franklin Rosemont November 2011 | $20.00 Marking the 125th anniversary of the 1886 bombing at Chicago’s Haymarket Square, in a revised and expanded edition co-published with the Charles H. Kerr Company, this profusely illustrated anthology reproduces hundreds of original documents, speeches, posters, and handbills, as well as contributions by many of today’s finest labor and radical historians focusing on Haymarket’s enduring influence around the world—including the eight-hour workday. Read More … Cover design by John Yates
	Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle, by Maia Ramnath December 2011 | $16.00 Decolonizing Anarchism looks at the history of South Asian struggles against colonialism and neocolonialism, highlighting lesser-known dissidents as well as iconic figures. The third in our Anarchist Interventions series co-published by AK & the IAS! Read More … Cover design by Josh MacPhee, cover art by Favianna Rodriguez
	In the Shadow of State Power: CLR James, Direct Democracy, and National Liberation Struggles, by Matthew Quest January 2012 | $21.00 A new scholarly analysis of the importance of direct democracy and national liberation in the work of autonomous Marxist intellectual C.L.R. James. Read More … Cover design by Tim Simons
	The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics, edited by Deric Shannon, Anthony Nocella II, and John Asimakoupolos January 2012 | $21.00 The only crisis of capitalism is capitalism itself. Let’s toss credit default swaps, bailouts, environmental externalities and, while we’re at it, private ownership of production in the dustbin of history. The Accumulation of Freedom brings together economists, historians, theorists, and activists for a first-of-its-kind study of anarchist economics. Read More … Cover design by Kate Khatib
	Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore February 2012 | $17.95 Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. A sassy and splintering emergency intervention! Read More … Cover design by John Yates, Cover photo by Charlie Stephens
	Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain, by Frank Mintz, with a prologue by Chris Ealham March 2012 | $17.00 This is the first English translation of Frank Mintz’s seminal study of the economic experiments put into place during the Spanish Revolution to both sustain civil society during the war and, more importantly, act as the material basis for a new society. Read More … Cover design by Josh MacPhee

Remembering George Jackson: 40 Years Later

Posted on August 21st, 2011 in Recommended Reading

Today—August 21, 2011—marks the 40th anniversary of the murder of George Jackson by the San Quentin prison administration. But his legacy lives on in today’s struggles. On this day, we hope you will take a moment to learn more about the history of George Jackson and others like him who have resisted state repression and demanded justice for prisoners.

Our friends at the Freedom Archives have put together a tribute video for the occasion:

You can also listen to (and download!) the George Jackson Tribute Mixtape compiled by Jared Ball, author of I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto. Check that out here.

Both the video and the mixtape borrow some audio from the Freedom Archives/AK Press audio documentary Prisons on Fire: George Jackson, Attica, and Black Liberation. We encourage you to get a copy, listen, and share it. Make sure it is in our local library; use it in your own mixtapes; encourage your local radio station to broadcast it. The 40th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion is coming up on September 9, and these two anniversaries are a good chance to reflect on the histories of George Jackson and Attica and their lessons for our movements for prison abolition.

For more resources on the history of prisoner resistance and today’s struggles against the Prison Industrial Complex, check out the Prisons/Prisoners section on our website. In honor of George Jackson and Attica (as well as the recent prison hunger strikes), we’ve also put together a discounted Prisoner Resistance Package this month that includes Prisons on Fire as well as Marshall “Eddie” Conway’s autobiography Marshall Law, and When the Prisoners Ran Walpole. There are countless other histories to be kept alive and learned from.

But on this day, we remember George Jackson.

Shon Meckfessel on “Suffled How It Gush”

Posted on August 19th, 2011 in Events

Shon Meckfessel appropriates the peculiar slogan of an Albanian mineral water company as the title for this uniquely intellectual book. Equal parts journalism, history, and personal memoir, Suffled How it Gush records Shon’s travels throughout ex-Yugoslavia and the greater Balkans region, chronicling the beauty of an area too renowned for its ugliness.

See the book here: http://www.akpress.org/2009/items/suffledhowitgushakpress