Many readers of this blog are probably familiar with Joel Olson, author of The Abolition of White Democracy. Back in the day, Joel was a member of the Love and Rage anarchist federation. He was a founding member of Phoenix Copwatch, and is currently involved with Bring the Ruckus and the Repeal Coalition. He also finds time to be a professor at Northern Arizona University.
A while back, I heard that Joel was doing research on “fanaticism” and “extremism.” Knowing his work, this sounded pretty exciting to me…a project likely produce some interesting and useful political/strategic angles. Then, a fellow AK collective member sent me a web link to a talk Joel gave on the subject at the Phoenix Class War Council’s “Beer and Revolution” series. Almost a year later, I finally sat down with a beer of my own to listen. Like the fanatics and zealots he studies, Joel manages, in a little over an hour, to uncompromisingly reconfigure the map of political possibilities available to revolutionaries today.
You, too, can listen. I’ve pasted the multi-part audio link at the end of this post. Between here and there, you’ll find an interview I did with Joel after I heard the talk.
Read/listen on…
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AK: How did you first become interested in studying, fanaticism, extremism, and zealotry?
JO: In 2001, I was writing the last chapter for my first book, The Abolition of White Democracy, on what a world without whiteness might look like. I was reading up on the original abolitionist movement, particularly its main philosopher, Wendell Phillips (in The Lesson of the Hour, edited by Noel Ignatiev). I was intrigued by how Phillips openly embraced the label “fanatic” that anti-abolitionists threw at him. Then 9/11 happened, and I was struck by the contrast: on the one hand every media outlet was discussing the problem of “extremism” and “fanaticism” and what to do about it, while on the other hand I’m reading about this radical abolitionist who embraced the term, and even outlined a theory of fanatical politics. I got to thinking that maybe Phillips was right; maybe extremism is useful for those of us seeking a free society, and not just those seeking religious tyranny. (By the way, I consider the terms extremism, fanaticism, and zealotry to be functionally equivalent, and use them interchangeably.)
AK: One of the things I liked best about your talk was how methodically you differentiate between mainstream (i.e. pejorative) definitions of “fanaticism” and the way you use the term. Could you break that distinction down for us?
For most of its critics throughout Western history, fanaticism is an ideology of irrationality, intolerance, fundamentalism, and terrorism. Certainly many fanatics are irrational, intolerant, fundamentalist, undemocratic, and/or terrorists. But Wendell Phillips and his comrades were none of these things. They were fanatically opposed to slavery, but they were also radical democrats who opposed racial oppression, supported women’s rights, defended free speech, and believed in liberty and equality for all. The pejorative notion of extremism clouds our ability to understand radically democratic extremism.
From this, I came to conclude that extremism is not an ideology but an approach to politics. That is, it is not a set of specific ideas about how the world is run or how it should be run, like liberalism, conservatism, communism, or anarchism. Rather, it is a way of engaging in politics, and it is a method that can be used by any ideology or cause.
I define fanaticism as the unconventional, extraordinary political mobilization of the refusal to compromise. Fanaticism is an approach to politics, driven by an ardent devotion to a cause, that seeks to draw clear lines between friends and enemies in order to mobilize friends and moderates in the service of that cause. It is willing to use direct action or other unconventional means to achieve this.
AK: Fanatics draw clear lines between friends and enemies. But the “enemy” camp seems a lot bigger, because it includes moderates in some sense. In your talk, you say that one of the main features of fanaticism is its attempt to “squeeze and put pressure on the moderate middle.” In your paper “The Freshness of Fanaticism,” you dissect the concept of “moderation.” In that same essay, and in “Zealotry and the Jeremiad in American Political Thought,” you critically tackle terms like “consensus,” “compromise,” and “concession.” Could you talk about that a bit?
JO: Moderation (not tolerance or reason) is the true antithesis of fanaticism. While the essence of the fanatical approach to politics is a) the refusal to compromise, b) the desire to mobilize others based on that refusal, and c) the use of extraordinary means to mobilize them, moderation is an approach that regards compromise as the essence of political engagement. A moderate approach to politics seeks to negotiate a “common ground” that all parties can agree on. The fanatic divides the world into friends (those who are with you), enemies (those who are against you), and moderates in between (those who need to get off the fence); the moderate believes that with a little bargaining, we can all be friends. Extremism seeks combat, moderation seeks consensus.
Now, I don’t believe that extremism is always the better approach. If there is a potential to find common ground between you and your adversary, then you should seek it. But when compromise would violate your most closely held principles, or when your opponent refuses to compromise, or when your opponent claims to be helping you but really is oppressing you, then it makes sense to consider an extremist approach to politics rather than moderation.
Slavery is a good example of this. Phillips argued that any compromise with the slave masters perpetuated slavery, since any such compromise would have to acknowledge the master’s right to own slaves—precisely the principle that the abolitionists rejected. Thus any “moderate” position regarding slavery, Phillips argued, was objectively proslavery. The master must either free his slaves immediately and unconditionally, without asking for compensation, or abolitionists must fight against the slaveholders.
Anti-abortion militants use the same logic: you cannot compromise with baby-killers, they say. In fact, the right uses this logic all the time, and it’s one of the reasons why they win so often. I think the left would do well to consider this logic sometimes, too. Why should we compromise over the destruction of our environment? Why should we compromise over the exploitation that is inherent to capitalism? Why should we compromise over people’s right to live, love, and work wherever they please?
AK: Could we say that left-wing fanaticism is an attack on what would normally be seen as liberal “allies” (in the same way that right-wing fanaticism is an attack on moderate conservatives)?
JO: Not necessarily. The goal is to push the liberals to your side, not to push them away. But sometimes the way to do that is to yank them off the fence rather than gently invite them down. The anti-abortion movement, for example, doesn’t focus its energy on the pro-choice movement so much as it does on the “moderate” pro-lifers, i.e. those who believe that abortion is murder but won’t act like it. They use guilt, argumentation, pleading, scolding, and all sorts of other tactics to push the moderate middle to act as if abortion really is murder.
Left extremists could learn from this approach. Let’s take immigration and the debate over the recently passed Arizona law SB 1070, for example. (I’m a member of the Repeal Coalition, an organization that seeks to repeal all anti-immigrant laws in Arizona.) The current debate is between nativism (“Kick them all out and militarize the border”) or reform (“Let a few of them stay, kick the rest out, and militarize the border”). You can see that despite all the huffing and puffing in the media, it’s actually a very narrow debate. An extremist approach would create a third pole: the only moral option in a global economy is to let all human beings live, love, and work wherever they please, and let all humans participate in those affairs that affect their daily life. This approach places reform uncomfortably between nativism and open borders. Then, the extremist needs to relentlessly attack reform, showing how its “moderate” approach is objectively the same as nativism: it breaks up families, weakens workers’ power, and threatens the liberty of all people (for example, liberal New York Senator Charles Schumer’s plan for a biometric national identity card in his immigration reform bill). The extremist wants to show that there are really only two options in this struggle: nativism or freedom, “baby-killing” or “life,” slavery or abolition.
This weekend, Macio and I had the pleasure of tabling at an Oakland event, the Malcolm X Jazz Arts Festival. This is the second year we’ve managed to attend, but the tenth of its existence. The festival is organized by the EastSide Arts Alliance, a group of artists, cultural workers, and community organizers of colour doing great community work in the San Antonio area of Oakland chance would have it!
The festival consisted of jazz musicians and bands, of course, even a gumbo band, a graffiti stage, breakdancers, and a lot of local artists. There were also a lot of great local grassroots organizations selling their wares or passing out information, including Freedom Archives, Red Bike and Green, Black Organizing Project, Critical Resistance, and many others. There was also childcare, and food court with many rumoured-to-be-delicious nonvegan items (damn you!). About 3,000 people showed up, most of them friends of Macio’s. We had a great time, made some friends, and got a little sun-stroked.
Sadly, I forgot my camera, but I did take some nice cell phone pictures for you. Fortunately, my original plan, which involved taking a picture of my cellphone picture with a regular camera has proven unnecessary, though I still think that would be funny.
Macio between chai breaks (photo is crooked on purpose, btw)
View of the stage before the masses arrived!
Also, if you are sad cause you didn’t know we’d be out and about, then you should sign up for our events emails (we have a national and a Bay Area list), and god help us all, we are on facebook, myspace, twitter, and whatever else the kids are into these days.
An extremely special multimedia post for you today, dear readers. Last night (May 21), Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, Baltimore’s collectively-run infoshop and radical bookstore (and a great AK customer!) played host to a book talk by Marshall “Eddie” Conway, former Minister of Defense of the Baltimore Black Panther Party and currently incarcerated political prisoner. Thanks to the help of the tech team at Emma’s and Eddie’s defense team, Eddie called in to Red Emma’s from the Maryland State Correctional Facility in Jessup, MD to talk about his new book, The Greatest Threat:The Black Panther Party and COINTELPRO, recently released by iAMWE Publications in Baltimore.
The Greatest Threat puts the government’s war on the Panthers into historical context. Eddie spent years compiling the available documentation and research on COINTELPRO, and traced its dirty history, from the active repression of the black revolutionary movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, to the conditions of Black America today and the dozens of political prisoners who remain in U.S. prisons on charges stemming from their involvement in the Black liberation movement.
It was an extraordinary event, and an amazing experience. Eddie is a great and extraordinarily generous interlocutor, and for many of the folks assembled for the event, it was a chance to reconnect with an old friend and comrade, or an opportunity to learn and be inspired by the struggle and spirit of a movement elder.
In February 2011, AK will publish Eddie’s second book, Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, his autobiographical account of the rise and fall of the Panthers, his arrest, sham trial, and decades of incarceration, and his continuing organizing on the inside. I’m honored to be working with Eddie on his memoir, and I’m excited that you’ll all be able to read it next year!
In the meantime, check out the audio file linked below, and consider donating $20 and getting a copy of The Greatest Threat. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to Eddie’s defense fund. You can also read more about Eddie’s case at the Partnership for Social Justice website, and read Eddie’s latest update on his MySpace page.
Listen:
Email Erica Woodland (erica_woodland@hotmail.com) to donate to Eddie’s defense and get a copy of the book, or write to iAMWE Publications, PO Box 4628, Baltimore, MD 21212.
Just like the subject line says: we’re pleased to announce that we’ve just sent another book off to the printers—Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States. Actually, more than pleased. Ecstatic? Thrilled? Relieved? I’ve been stoked about this book since I first heard that Team Colors Collective was thinking about taking their 2008 online collection In the Middle of a Whirlwind (published in e-format by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press) and updating it with an eye towards print publication. It’s been an interesting and exciting ride working with Craig, Kevin, and Stevie from Team Colors to bring this book to life, thanks in no small part to the fact that we’ve been working under an intense deadline for the past six months: get the book out in time for the second United States Social Forum, taking place this June 22-26 in Detroit. Together, with the help of the amazingly patient authors included in the collection, as well as friends and family, we managed to cram a year’s worth of work editing & updating the book, going through multiple cover revisions, and getting the book into a final layout, into half the usual amount of time … and the book will, indeed, launch at the US Social Forum as planned!
Whirlwinds is an interesting and timely project. Originally conceived in 2008 as an intervention into the discourse around movement organizing against the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in the Twin Cities and Denver (respectively), what emerged from the project’s first incarnation was an overview of the myriad voices speaking out for social justice and the radical transformation of society in the United States. For the second version of the project, the edited collection that will find its way into thousands of hands this June at the Social Forum and beyond, Team Colors really submerged themselves in the feedback received for the first collection, thought about the critiques and criticism, looked for holes, for possible productive encounters, unlikely alliances, and representative stories of social movements in the United States. Orienting these stories around the idea of winds—of change, of resistance, of activity, and more—Team Colors aimed to evoke common understandings of radical community organizing, movement building, and the impetus and inspiration toward making a revolution possible.
The essays collected in Uses of a Whirlwind come from very different places: farms, forests, bookstores, streets and street corners, homes, corporate chains. Their authors organize in very different ways: art and media, mapping and research, theory and discussion, popular education, and road blockades. Yet they are all moved by the same desire: to create new worlds and new ways of being, and demanding nothing less. As Team Colors says, we are in the middle of a whirlwind of struggle and opportunities for fundamental change abound; it’s just a question of how we use them.
Whirlwinds includes contributions from Malav Kanuga (Bluestockings Books & Activism Center), Direct Action to Stop the War, Roadblock Earth First!, Starbucks Workers Union, Marina Karides (United States Social Forum), Student/Farmworker Alliance, City Life/Vida Urbana, Picture the Homeless, Take Back the Land, United Workers, Harmony Goldberg (Domestic Workers United & Right to the City Alliance), Basav Sen, John Peck (Family Farm Defenders), Brian Tokar, Benjamin Shepard, Julie Perini, Dorothy Kidd, Daniel Tucker (AREA Chicago), Maribel Casas-Cortes & Sebastian Cobarrubias, Brian Marks, Michael Hardt & El Kilomobo Intergaláctico, George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Peter Linebaugh, & Chris Carlsson.
It also includes interviews with Robin D.G. Kelley, Ashanti Omowali Alston, and Grace Lee Boggs. The Foreword is by Marc Herbst of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Andrej Grubacic provided a fantastic Preface, and Team Colors, themselves, wrote an excellent Introduction to contextualize the project as a whole. The book is tied together with the visual magic of three wonderful artists: Josh MacPhee (who designed the cover), Margaret Killjoy (who designed the interior), and Kristine Virsis (whose wasp-and-orchid drawings grace both the cover and interior of the book).
As a publisher, there’s nothing like reading a good interview with one of your authors. You get the same excitement and inspiration that any “regular” reader gets…but you also get to say: “Fuck yeah, that’s why we loved that guy/gal enough to devote so much time to publishing their ideas!”
Case in point: Yiannis Aktimon, a member of the Void Network (whose We Are an Image from the Future, we published in March), recently conducted an amazing interview with David Graeber. We’ve published three of David’s books (Possibilities, Direct Action, and Constituent Imagination). If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading any of those, the interview below will introduce you to the kick-ass, common-sense complexity of David’s thought, in which, even at his most theoretical, even when he’s shattering received wisdom and inventing new political paradigms, one never has the sense of being spoken down to. It always feels like a conversation.
When I read this interview, I was reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s description of his own theoretical approach as “plumpes Denken.” You could translate that as “crude/vulgar/blunt thought,” which Brecht might have been fine with. But I prefer to think of it as “rough-and-ready thought,” something perfectly suited to an ethnographer like David, who “grounds” both political strategy and social theory in a very literal sense. What Frederic Jameson said about Brecht could apply equally well to David: he uses a method “whereby the dilemma in question is turned inside out, and an unexpected, unforeseeable line of attack opens up.”
Void Network: Dear David Graeber, good afternoon from Exarchia area, Athens Greece. Here there are some questions that you might try to answer, so we can publish them in the pre-Bfest Babylonia issue.
So; How can you define the anti-authoritarian movement and attitude of today? Do you think that we are facing a major turning point that somehow is showing the limits, of ideology in contradiction with an anti-authoritarian view free from ideological obstacles?
DG: If by “ideology” you mean the idea that one needs to establish a global analysis before taking action (which inevitably leads to the assumption that an intellectual vanguard must necessarily play leadership role in any popular political movement) then I think, yes, we do see a gradual movement away from that. Much of my last ten years of intellectual life has been trying to think about ways in which intellectuals can play a useful role without descending into ideologists. There are no obvious answers though. I think we have come to a broad consensus about the fact that a diversity of perspectives, even incommensurable perspectives, is not a problem but actually a resource for our movements—since if the operative question is not “how do we define the situation?” but “how shall we act together to further our common goals?”—that is, if it’s practical problem-solving, then obviously a group of people with diverse perspectives will have more useful insights and ideas than a group of people who all think exactly the same. This is an important breakthrough. But it still leaves some questions unanswered: you can’t just start, as John Holloway says, with “the scream”, the instinctive feeling that capitalism isn’t right, and then move to action—the very fact that you identify “capitalism” as the problem means there is some shared analysis, or else, there’d be no reason for us not to be working with fascists, nationalists, sexists, or for that matter the capitalists themselves. No one has quite resolved all of these questions but my impression is we’ve made a lot of progress—much more, in fact, in the last ten years than in whole fifty years previous to that.
Void Network: Is there really anarchy, an open social movement, or have some of the most advanced fractions of it turned to be more and more abstract, in the area of theory, losing themselves inside an avant-gardism of activism, only compared in the past to Marxist-Leninist views?
DG: By “advanced” I guess you mean “self-conscious?” I once wrote a little propaganda pamphlet called “Are you an Anarchist? The answer may surprise you!” I think most people share anarchist values and even practice anarchism (direct action, mutual aid, voluntary association) most of the time. I’d actually go even further. Most human activity, on the micro-level, is essentially communistic, in that it’s cooperative, and/or based on some variation of the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” Even bankers act this way with each other, and so do the people who clean the bank. Capitalism is built on endless diffuse forms of communism and always has been. I think one problem with the sort of self-conscious, revolutionary activist elites you are talking about is that they sometimes lose track of that, and fall into a certain elitism. This in turn renders much of their activism ineffective as they seem ridiculous to most of the people that they would like to bring into their movement. In America, for instance, there’s a huge debate about “activist culture”—which is treated, especially by groups representing people of color, poor people, black people, immigrants, the truly oppressed, as a bad thing, a form of white privilege, or middle-class privilege, in itself. There’s a terrible paradox here. Once we reject the old, depressing Stalinist ideal of the grim, calculating revolutionary who denies him or herself everything because of their dedication to the revolution—since such people, even if they win, are unlikely to create a world anyone would want to live in—then we’ve got to accept that personal liberation, the creation of experiments in life, free communities, has to go hand-in hand with the work of fighting capitalism. But somehow our very attempts to create fragments of what a free society might be like make us seem absurd, even monstrous, to many of those we see as our natural allies—and makes us incapable of seeing that to some degree, they are already doing the very things we think we’re inventing (consensus decision-making, alternative economies).
So I take your question in that way: we develop not a theoretical avant garde, so much as a practical one. Now, something like that is probably inevitable: how to make alliances between those people whose main problem is oppression, and those whose main problem is alienation? In a way that’s the ultimate revolutionary problem. We shouldn’t blame ourselves—actually, I think that’s part of the problem. Blaming ourselves means thinking about ourselves and if there’s one absolutely legitimate grievance people have against these self-appointed activist elites it’s that they are a little self-obsessed, which is, of course, the ultimate bourgeois vice. Thinking about your own privilege is still just thinking about yourself. We need to learn how to stop thinking about ourselves and to think about other people more.
Void Network: How much do the great social movements of today, like the emigration movement and the current ecological movement, have to do with the infiltrations of anti-authoritarian ideas into them?
DG: I have only had the opportunity to observe in detail what’s happened in North America, and to some degree in the UK, but my impression is that anti-authoritarian forms of process have had an enormous impact and it’s really one of our greatest accomplishments. I was in the NYC Direct Action Network from 2000-2003, when it broke up, and we always said we didn’t want to last forever—we were primarily a way of disseminating a certain set of principles of democratic process, showing how self-organization could, effectively, work, and much better than the forms of authoritarian dictat or top-down phony “democracy” we were up against. The remarkable thing is how fast this happened. Much faster than we anticipated. True, there’s a lot of debate now about moving away from a pure network model and towards more permanent forms of organization, and this is a healthy debate, we need a wide range of institutional forms here too, but the whole field of debate has shifted dramatically in an anti-authoritarian direction.
Void Network: What are the major challenges of anti-authoritarian movements of today? Is there really a revolution to be waited for, or in truth, the radical procedure of the present, which has to do with the ideas and forces of a general daily reformation of life?
DG: Globally, I think we are at a turning point, but that turning point has been, as it were, endlessly suspended. One reason the alter-globalization movement slowed down so in the second half of the ’00s was not just the lingering effects of the war on terror and resultant stepping up of repression, but the fact that the other side simply couldn’t get their act together. They were faced with enormous structural crises, really, the effects of the same broad diffuse popular resistance of which our movements were perhaps the most self-conscious, explicit, and articulate form. Yet all they did was bicker with each other at their summits—they didn’t really seem to have a strategy, and thus, it was very hard to come up with a strategy of opposition. This might be changing now. As for the grand strategic question: well, I don’t think the transformation of daily life, and the larger question of revolution, can any longer be clearly separated. How might radical transformation happen? We can’t know. We’re really flying blind. But I also think we’ve been working with a very limited set of historical analogies: the history of revolutionary movements first in Europe in the 18th and 19th century, then globally in the 20th, but that’s it. It’s a tiny tiny slice of human history. There have been hundreds of successful revolutions in world history we don’t even know how to see. It’s quite likely that many of the “primitive communists” in say, the Eastern Woodlands of North America that so inspired Engels, or in Amazonia, weren’t primitive at all, but the descendants of revolutionaries, of people who had overthrown earlier centralized states. The world is much more complicated, and the history of resistance much deeper than we have been taught to imagine.
Or another way of making the same point: we have come to accept, over the last couple hundred years, since the Enlightenment basically, that there is only one paradigm for fundamental social change, “the transition from feudalism to capitalism”—which must then be the model for the next one, “the transition from capitalism to socialism” (or whatever). It’s becoming screamingly obvious that the transition to whatever comes next is not going to look like that. So people think no revolutionary change is possible at all. Nonsense. Capitalism is unsustainable. Something will replace it. For me, I think a more useful paradigm right now is the transition from slavery to feudalism, at least in Europe. Remember, under Rome, huge percentages of the population of the empire were outright chattel slaves (maybe a third, even, and much more if you count the coloni and debt-peons and so on who were effectively slaves). A few hundreds years later, the number of slaves in Europe was almost none. This was one of the greatest liberations in human history (and similar things did happen in India and China around the same time.) How did it happen? How were all the slaves freed? Well, since we’re only used to seeing it from an elite perspective as “the decline and fall of the Roman empire” and can’t see any explicit anti-slavery movements, we’re unable to write the history at all, but it happened. Will wage-slavery be eliminated in a similar apparently catastrophic and confused moment? It’s possible. But it could only happen the first because of pressure from below, based on certain egalitarian values that were always there, all operating below the historical radar screen. Obviously, there were also horrific thugs taking advantage of the chaos, as there will be now too. But we need to think about how to mobilize similar bottom-up alliances when things start breaking down.
Dear readers: We here at AK Press were both shocked and (we’ll admit it) thrilled when right-wing media mogul Glenn Beck held up our new book on the Greek Insurrection of December 2008 on his FOX News program a couple of weeks ago, and compared it to The Coming Insurrection, saying that this book was the next “playbook” that radicals in this country would be taking a page from. (We wish.) But we were also kind of confused, because Beck seemed eager to interpret the book as a yet another installment in the “communist” conspiracy … only, well, we’re anarchists, we’re damn proud of that fact, and we’re frankly a little hard pressed to understand why Beck went out of his way to say explicitly that this wasn’t an anarchist book. And then we watched hours and hours of Beck blabbing on YouTube, and we started to notice a more general pattern: Beck tends to avoid directly confronting “anarchism” as a system of political actions and ideals. So we started thinking about why that might be, and the result of our deep deliberations follows in an open letter to Mr. Beck. We encourage you to post this far & wide; let’s take advantage of this unexpected moment and try and push for some real public discourse around anarchism, about what it means, and about why it works.
An Open Letter to Glenn Beck from the AK Press Collective
Hi Glenn.
How’s it going? Since Forbes magazine says your annual earnings are in the ballpark of $32 million, we’re guessing that it’s going pretty well. You can’t put a price on defending the little guy, right?
We are the AK Press collective. In case the word “collective” throws you, it means people who work together toward a shared goal in a democratic manner, without bosses or leaders, and with everyone having an equal say in each decision. For us, that shared goal is publishing and distributing books. If you want, you can learn more about us here: http://www.akpress.org/about/aboutakenglish.
Okay, to be honest, we weren’t sure what your argument was. We watched the clip on YouTube a dozen times, but it was beyond us.Of course, you’re the guy with television, radio, publishing, and Internet empires. We probably spend too much time thinking about rent, food, and health insurance to fully understand the big picture you’re painting.
We do, however, know a few things. We’re anarchists and we publish books about anarchism. We Are an Image from the Future is one of them. Now, we assume that you actually read the books you talk about on your show. Yet you somehow managed to claim that a book written by and about anarchists was “written by communist revolutionaries.” “They are not anarchists,” you claimed, “but they will use anarchy to their favor.”
As you made clear earlier in your show, you know the difference between Communism and Anarchism. We don’t want to split hairs by bringing up the complex history of communism (with a small “c”), which includes both democratic and nasty authoritarian versions. So we’ll stay on your page here and say, yes, when Communists take state power it’s always ugly. But, as you must know, anarchism has always opposed state Communism. State Communism is the ultimate “big government.” You won’t find an anarchist on this planet in favor of that. Not to mention that, historically, when Communists get in the driver’s seat, anarchists are usually the first to face the firing squad. The capitalists usually get cushy managerial positions.
So we asked ourselves: What could account for this guy waving around a book written and published by anarchists, while never quoting a single word from it, and then going on to associate the book with political groups—like the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Workers World Party—that no one in the book, or associated with the book, would endorse? How could he miss something so obvious?
Then it dawned on us: you’re afraid of anarchists. You’re not afraid of the fake media portrayal of anarchists as bomb-throwing maniacs: that’s your bread and butter. You’re afraid of real anarchists, the actual ideas they espouse, the real work they do.
We don’t blame you, Glenn. When we sift through your rants, we realize that there’s a lot of overlap between you and anarchists. The difference is that anarchists are more honest, aren’t part of the same elites they criticize, and they make a lot more sense. They see you, and raise you one.
Like you, we believe that people’s lives would be much better off without government intervention. Centralized power suppresses individual and community initiative and keeps people from achieving their full potential. Like you, we don’t think the solution to our current economic crisis lies in socialized industry or new layers of well-paid government bureaucrats. And, like you and many of your tea party pals, we agree that bankers and fat-cat corporate elites aren’t exactly concerned with our best interests. As you put it, it’s time to take down the folks who “line their pockets with wealth gained from enslaving a whole group of people.” And, although you seemed a bit confused on this point, that means putting “people before profits,” which is pretty much the central concern of the protesters in Greece right now. And we mean all people, regardless of income, race, gender, sexuality, or immigration status.
You’re right: we’re revolutionaries. But aren’t you? Remember the part of the Declaration of Independence that says that when a government starts screwing with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”? As anarchists, we’re dedicated to the idea of abolishing the state and capitalism altogether. We believe that without the coercive relations and competition imposed by governments and markets, people would be free to create a more just society in which resources are controlled collectively and decisions are made by the people who are affected by them. We don’t want a government (revolutionary or otherwise); we want a society based on cooperation and common sense instead of arbitrary power and exploitation.
From what sense we can make of your show, you seem happy with “altering” rather than “abolishing” a screwed-up system. For you, replacing the old boss with a new one (Sarah Palin?) is good enough. We understand that you’re confused—these are confusing times. But, deep down, you and the tea partiers know that you can’t trust any politician, or banker, or corporate hack, or union bureaucrat…or anyone who makes their living sucking power and profit from ordinary people. Which, unfortunately, probably includes multi-millionaires like you.
So, Glenn, we’re guessing that’s why you’re so afraid of us. We don’t fit neatly into your black-and-white formula. You simply borrow some of the best ideas from our 150-year-old anti-authoritarian tradition. We take those same ideas and not only run with them, but improve on them. We follow the logic to its ethical conclusion. And we include corporate media moguls like you in our Hall of Infamy.
But we’re reasonable folk. We understand that you find it scary to think about what will happen when ordinary people realize that they actually have the power to make their own decisions and take control of their own lives. So, here’s what we suggest:
Just admit you’re afraid of us. Admit that your passionate and convoluted rants are a nervous dance around your inability to support real freedom (anarchism) over unbridled power (Communism and capitalism). And then use your massive wealth and power for the forces of good.
Way back in March of 2008, just as we were getting things up and running out here in the land of AK Baltimore, I helped to organize The City from Below Conference, a three-day gathering of activists, academics, artists, and other all-around interesting folks, at the 2640 Space, a radical community center that’s a part of the Red Emma’s proliferation here in town. City from Below was an amazing experience; it was a chance to really see theory and praxis interacting and shaping each other in a multiplicity of ways. The City from Below conference actually makes an appearance in an upcoming AK Press book, Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the U.S., which I have been frantically proofreading for the past week. Reading over the transcript from the “Organizing Models” roundtable that appears in Whirlwinds reminded me that I’ve been sitting on some of the videos from CfB for a while now, meaning to post them up on the AK Blog from time to time, and I’ve decided that today is the day to start that project!
The original AK Baltimore office (we’ve now moved to a larger space, stay tuned for more details on that later this month) was actually right up the street from 2640, and it served as the main organizing headquarters in the lead-up to the City from Below conference … and as a supplementary space for interviews and small working-group meetings during the conference itself.
One of the most interesting videos from that weekend was actually shot in the AK office. It’s urban sociologist and Marxist geographer David Harvey in dialogue with our friend Marina, an activist and documentary videographer from Barcelona. In the video, David talks about the history of urban development and gentrification in Baltimore, and in Barcelona. It’s an interesting conversation, and a useful one, especially for those of us who are thinking hard about the nature of urban development in the United States and how that affects the work we do as activists and organizers. It’s a reminder that we need to look both inside the U.S. and outside of it to really understand how development happens, and to find models for how we can work to shape the social, political, and geographical worlds we live in. Here’s David and Marina chatting, against the backdrop of a wall of AK Press titles:
I think this video is especially relevant right now. It popped into my head when I was thinking about one of our new releases, Chris Ealham’s Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898-1937. Of course this video discusses a very different time period in Barcelona’s (and Baltimore’s) history, but in some ways, the struggle for control of the city’s spaces that Ealham discusses in the context of the early industrial period before the Spanish Civil War are still going on today. A friend of mine, one of the most brilliant folks I know, and an urban activist herself, told me recently that she thought that Chris’s book was the best analysis Barcelona she’d read to date, which I take as very, very high praise.
It also points to a deeper relevance of a book like Anarchism and the City than we might realize at first glance. When I talked to Chris about promoting his book, really early on, he talked about it as not just a history, but as a blueprint for contemporary action. He told me a story about a talk he gave in Barcelona, at the end of which an activist working in one of the city’s old industrial neighborhoods came up to him, and told him that their group was using Anarchism and the City as a “manual de lucha,” a fighting manual. How many historians can say that? So watch the video, and then check out Chris’s book for some historical context. (Zach was kind enough to post an excerpt of it up on the blog a couple of weeks ago, if you want a sneak preview!)
The Justseeds Artists’ Collective and Microcosm have collaborated to produce a collection of illustrious portraits accompanied by short biographies of radical activist, artist, and social justice thinkers from all over the Americas. Seventy-eight firebrands graces these pages with tales of their endless struggle for justice in the face of fascism, tyranny, censorship, and hatred. Pick this book up to learn more about Chico Mendes, C.L.R James, Frida Kahlo, Arlen Siu, Sitting Bull, Helen Keller, Simon Bolivar, Dorothy Day, Gloria Anzaldula, Yuri Kochiyama, Tupac Shakur, Henry Morgentaler, and , well, the list goes on…but I don’t want to ruin all the surprises. This books is better than an Advent Calendar. Yeah, I said it. Again, Justseeds has broken the mold and found delightfully creative ways of depicting staples of inspiration in radical and leftist communities. Hot off the press, come and get it!
Remember when racism ended in America? Ah, c’mon, how could you forget? It happened when Blacks and Whites were allowed to share water fountains after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Or was it when the U.S. returned minuscule pieces of land to Native Americans in exchange for isolation, deprivation, and environmental abuse. No, wait , it totally happened when the U.S. shut down the last Japanese internment camp. I’m completely, off. Racism in the U.S. ended when Barak Obama was elected President…right? While I brush up on my history lessons you should check out this new book by Tim Wise outlining an escalation in blatant racist policies and political practices in the name of a colorblind United States of America. Oh! I remember now, racism ended when Arizona decided being Latino, Mexican or Chicano is probable cause and warrants police harassment.
Raise your hand if you thought Creed was a Christian band. It’s ok, common misunderstanding. Please redirect your attention to this new book put out by Soft Skull Press. In it you can learn about the multi-billion dollar industry of Christian pop culture, including raves, rock bands, theme parks, romance novels, and, yes, wrestling. Daniel Radosh examines eighteen towns over the U.S. and their involvement in changing monies in the sacred temple of…I mean, the Christian Pop Industry.
If you enjoy good folklore and great comic books then eat this shit for breakfast! This book contains more than twenty graphic adaptations of Native American stories of the Trickster. All cultures have tales of the trickster—a crafty creature or being who uses cunning to get food, steal precious possessions, or simply cause mischief. In Native American traditions, the trickster takes many forms, from coyote or rabbit to raccoon or raven. The first graphic anthology of Native American trickster tales, Trickster brings together Native American folklore and the world of comics.
So, at this point, we all know what a terrorist looks like, correct? And we all know to be afraid, right? Because they’re all insane, brainwashed, suicidal murderers who at any moment could go “Speed” on our asses. Well, if you’re done watching Fox News and listening to Glenn Beck go ahead and try reading this new book by Nasser Abufarha. In The Making of a Human Bomb, Nasser Abufarha, a Palestinian anthropologist, explains the cultural logic underlying Palestinian martyrdom operations (suicide attacks) launched against Israel during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-06). In so doing, he sheds much-needed light on how Palestinians have experienced and perceived the broader conflict.
Open this book and the first thing you will see : “What are you doing after the orgy or the insurrection or whatever?” I’m going to have to quote Lorna on this one. I am at a bit of a loss as to how to describe this (though i could read you some funny passages), so I will quote the Institute for Experimental Freedom: “The book is a collection of texts, images, and design sensibilities which combine insurrectional theory, critical theory, and post-structuralist inquiries about power and subjectivization with experimental fiction, flarf poetry, Brechtian pornography, and Swiss-influenced post-ironic typographic design.” Why would I choose a book I’m not really sure about for my top ten? Because I think I slept with a woman who slept with the a man who sent it to us. Just kidding, in reality this book has a lot to offer, I just haven’t finished reading it.
Diving into the political strategies of post-Civil Rights Movement African American activists in Detroit Now Is the Time! traces the complicated legacy of community activism to illuminate what is required for grassroots activists to be effective in demanding public accountability to poor and marginalized citizens. This book is relatively cheap for a University Press so pick it up, pick it up now! Before you head out for the US Social Forum or Allied Media Conference. Know something about a city before you descend upon it I say!
If you’re into understanding the “larger picture” of how our societies not only came to function but are inherently dysfunctional this is your jam. Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach for understanding the history and development of the modern world by explaining the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis.
Semiotext(e) is on a roll! And AK Press is keeping up. In addition to The Violence of Financial Capitalism, A Thousand Machines, The Coming Insurrection, The Screwball Asses, you can now order Introduction to Civil War from our website. From the back of the book: “Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which they hold together the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which they prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion.” Oh yeah, that theory turn you on? Me too.
This land is your land, this land is my land from California to…Oh, apologies. I thought I was somewhere else for a moment. Right, well, on a completely unrelated note the University of California Press just released this book making a powerful case for understanding the complex, often paradoxical history of immigration restriction as we work through the issues that inform, and often distort, the debate over who can become a citizen, who decides, and on what basis. UC Berkeley might want to apply some theories from the insightful books they publish to their practices as a University. Don’t jail students for standing up to high tuition costs….T!
A number of people have asked me about how to support groups doing good work against the nasty immigration shit going on in Arizona. Work that doesn’t limit itself to “mere” reform. I’ve also been sad witness to several toothless Facebook groups that seem to limit “support” to pressing a few buttons on your computer keyboard to register your dissatisfaction…uh, and that’s it.
So, below is a list of organizations I think you should consider supporting in concrete ways. Each link I provide includes some way to donate funds…and some offer other ways to help out.
And remember the words of Public Enemy in “By the Time I Get to Arizona”: “Neither party is mine, not the jackass or the elephant.”
“The Arizona Repeal Coalition is an organization committed to repealing over 60 anti-immigrant laws and bills that have been passed or considered by Arizona politicians in the past few years. We demand the repeal of all laws—federal, state, and local—that degrade and discriminate against undocumented individuals and that deny U.S. citizens their lawful rights. We demand that all human beings—with papers or without—be guaranteed access to work, housing, health care, education, legal protection, and other public benefits, as well as the right to organize. Our strategy is to help build a grass roots social movement that can repeal these laws, change the terms of the national debate on immigration, and expand the freedom of all people—documented and undocumented.
“We believe that all people have the right to live, love, and work wherever they please, and this is what we strive for.”
Regarding more specific forms of assistance, Repeal Coalition member Taryn D. Jordan writes:
Money. As I have stated before we are all broke here and living on the goodness of the center of new community. So if comrades could start hosting house parties what ever you can send will be helpful. We need money for copies of fliers, gas to get around town and t shirts, and money for mass texting services.
We need people. I know in our last few communications with folks we have demanded for organizers but we are willing to take less experienced folks if they are the right person. We will be conducting interviews via Skype. We hope if you all know of folks who have skill sets in, activism, video editing (and equipment), work shop building, theoretical background lending towards the importance of grassroots organizing etc. We’ll take them. We will develop a work plan and a 3 – 4 hour work shop orientation along with plugging them in to other activities around town if needed. The reason we are willing to take more folks then before is we are hedging on a two front war and between the three of us, the work will not sustain if we don’t get help really soon. For right now lodging can be free due to the love and kindness of the Center for a New Community. But all other expenses will have to be paid by the person coming.
We still need you political support: I will continue to post reports and attempt to make them as nice as possible. If folks will support me in turning this into some sort of blog entry or something and get the word out nationally on what we are doing that would be great. We will also be emailing videos (shot via cell phone) or recorded mp3s of our thoughts on this growing movement. If comrades with better tech skills then the three of us can help in getting this posted please do so, we will provide content in what ever way we can.
“The focus of our work should be involving ourselves in movements and activism where there is the potential to work toward the building of a dual power. Social reforms won by progressive movements may be important, but if they do not work toward a dual power they are not the concerns of a revolutionary organization. For example, animal liberation is a worthy cause. However, it is difficult to imagine how a campaign for animal liberation could threaten state power and foreshadow a new society. Thus, while a revolutionary organization may applaud animal liberation activities, it would not devote energy toward animal rights. On the other hand, a program to develop local Copwatch chapters could represent a dual power strategy, since monitoring the police undermines state power by disrupting the cops’ ability to enforce class and color lines and also foreshadows a new society in which ordinary people take responsibility for ensuring the safety of their communities.”
“Phoenix Class War Struggle is a fanatical, revolutionary anarchist group pressing the attack against capitalism, the state and all systems of hierarchy and oppression. We fight for a self-determined, projectual life for ourselves and all humanity. We oppose those who hinder working class self-organization. We are libertarian and libertine. We support movements but we don’t wait for them. We are in the thick of it.”
“Phoenix Copwatch is a citizen’s group formed in 1998 to combat abuse by the police in our community. We use a variety of means to fight police abuse, including community patrols, videotaping of police activity, and education. Copwatch is completely independent from the police, all other law enforcement agencies, the government, and all political parties. Although Copwatch groups exist in many other cities around the world, they all operate independently, and there is no national or international body that oversees our organization. All of our members are unpaid volunteers who freely dedicate their time to ending police abuse.”
“O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective is made up Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham youth who are pressing the attack against the ongoing colonization of our traditional lands (i.e. U.S./Mexico Border policies), environmental racism from transnational corporations and the state, and all colonial polices aimed at destroying our O’odham Him’dag (Traditional Way of Life). We fight for self-determination, and true sovereignty of our lands. We advocate for the traditional elders in Mexico and the United States. We provide an autonomous space for O’odham to educate themselves on the issues that affect our land and people (our future). We encourage and support all O’odham, especially the youth, in carrying on our traditional practices, just as our ancestors did before us. Our projects of solidarity are our politics. You dig?”
“We are an Indigenous-established volunteer-run collective dedicated to creatively confronting and overcoming social and environmental injustices in Flagstaff and surrounding areas. We are restoring and redefining knowledge and information in ways that will be meaningful to our communities. We offer access to independent media, the arts, and alternative education, with the goal of self-development as well as empowerment for youth and the greater community into action in favor of a more just and sustainable world.
“In 2007 community members and an Indigenous youth empowerment media collective called “Outta Your Backpack Media” (OYBM) came together with a vision to establish a space that cultivates active resistance to capitalism, environmental & social injustices in and around our community of Flagstaff. Since then TaalaHooghan infoshop has hosted all ages shows, film screenings of hard to find political movies, the Free Free Market, silkscreening, D.I.Y. art skill shares, and provided meeting and event space for other organizations.
OYBM has worked with more than 300 youth and produced dozens of short films at free youth workshops, some of which have been screened nationally and internationally at film festivals.”
From former (and still much beloved) AK Press collective member, Jayden Donahue:
I decided to read You Don’t Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of CLR James while planning my trip to Trinidad and it just so happens that I was still reading it while we were there. I felt that it was important, especially as a white person, to have some basis of analysis around colonialism and resistance in the Caribbean while visiting. I found the lectures particularly suited to this study because James also explores culture and literature, specifically addressing Trinidad, so I learned about some authors that I never would have otherwise. I found that the lectures brought up many questions for me around the the larger Caribbean diaspora and the current economic state of Trinidad (which unlike other Caribbean nations does not rely on tourism, but rather oil production, as the basis of its economy) as well as the colonial legacy which still seems very alive and well in Trinidad’s government and education systems.
His grave, located in an overgrown and otherwise unremarkable cemetery in Port of Spain, reads:
Cyril Lionel Robert James, 1901-1989, Man of Letters
“Times would pass. Old empires would fall and new ones take their place. The relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement. Not where you are or what you have but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.” —from his book Beyond a Boundary
Many readers of this blog are probably familiar with Joel Olson, author of The Abolition of White Democracy. Back in the day, Joel was a member of the Love and Rage anarchist federation. He was a founding member of Phoenix Copwatch, and is currently involved with Bring the Ruckus and the Repeal Coalition. He also finds time to be a professor at Northern Arizona University.
JO: In 2001, I was writing the last chapter for my first book, The Abolition of White Democracy, on what a world without whiteness might look like. I was reading up on the original abolitionist movement, particularly its main philosopher, Wendell Phillips (in The Lesson of the Hour, edited by Noel Ignatiev). I was intrigued by how Phillips openly embraced the label “fanatic” that anti-abolitionists threw at him. Then 9/11 happened, and I was struck by the contrast: on the one hand every media outlet was discussing the problem of “extremism” and “fanaticism” and what to do about it, while on the other hand I’m reading about this radical abolitionist who embraced the term, and even outlined a theory of fanatical politics. I got to thinking that maybe Phillips was right; maybe extremism is useful for those of us seeking a free society, and not just those seeking religious tyranny. (By the way, I consider the terms extremism, fanaticism, and zealotry to be functionally equivalent, and use them interchangeably.)
Slavery is a good example of this. Phillips argued that any compromise with the slave masters perpetuated slavery, since any such compromise would have to acknowledge the master’s right to own slaves—precisely the principle that the abolitionists rejected. Thus any “moderate” position regarding slavery, Phillips argued, was objectively proslavery. The master must either free his slaves immediately and unconditionally, without asking for compensation, or abolitionists must fight against the slaveholders.
Left extremists could learn from this approach. Let’s take immigration and the debate over the recently passed Arizona law SB 1070, for example. (I’m a member of the Repeal Coalition, an organization that seeks to repeal all anti-immigrant laws in Arizona.) The current debate is between nativism (“Kick them all out and militarize the border”) or reform (“Let a few of them stay, kick the rest out, and militarize the border”). You can see that despite all the huffing and puffing in the media, it’s actually a very narrow debate. An extremist approach would create a third pole: the only moral option in a global economy is to let all human beings live, love, and work wherever they please, and let all humans participate in those affairs that affect their daily life. This approach places reform uncomfortably between nativism and open borders. Then, the extremist needs to relentlessly attack reform, showing how its “moderate” approach is objectively the same as nativism: it breaks up families, weakens workers’ power, and threatens the liberty of all people (for example, liberal New York Senator Charles Schumer’s plan for a biometric national identity card in his immigration reform bill). The extremist wants to show that there are really only two options in this struggle: nativism or freedom, “baby-killing” or “life,” slavery or abolition.
This weekend, Macio and I had the pleasure of tabling at an Oakland event, the Malcolm X Jazz Arts Festival. This is the second year we’ve managed to attend, but the tenth of its existence. The festival is organized by the 
An extremely special multimedia post for you today, dear readers. Last night (May 21), 
In February 2011, AK will publish Eddie’s second book, Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, his autobiographical account of the rise and fall of the Panthers, his arrest, sham trial, and decades of incarceration, and his continuing organizing on the inside. I’m honored to be working with Eddie on his memoir, and I’m excited that you’ll all be able to read it next year!
The Justseeds Artists’ Collective and Microcosm have collaborated to produce a collection of illustrious portraits accompanied by short biographies of radical activist, artist, and social justice thinkers from all over the Americas. Seventy-eight firebrands graces these pages with tales of their endless struggle for justice in the face of fascism, tyranny, censorship, and hatred. Pick this book up to learn more about Chico Mendes, C.L.R James, Frida Kahlo, Arlen Siu, Sitting Bull, Helen Keller, Simon Bolivar, Dorothy Day, Gloria Anzaldula, Yuri Kochiyama, Tupac Shakur, Henry Morgentaler, and , well, the list goes on…but I don’t want to ruin all the surprises. This books is better than an Advent Calendar. Yeah, I said it. Again, Justseeds has broken the mold and found delightfully creative ways of depicting staples of inspiration in radical and leftist communities. Hot off the press, come and get it!
Remember when racism ended in America? Ah, c’mon, how could you forget? It happened when Blacks and Whites were allowed to share water fountains after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Or was it when the U.S. returned minuscule pieces of land to Native Americans in exchange for isolation, deprivation, and environmental abuse. No, wait , it totally happened when the U.S. shut down the last Japanese internment camp. I’m completely, off. Racism in the U.S. ended when Barak Obama was elected President…right? While I brush up on my history lessons you should check out this new book by Tim Wise outlining an escalation in blatant racist policies and political practices in the name of a colorblind United States of America. Oh! I remember now, racism ended when Arizona decided being Latino, Mexican or Chicano is probable cause and warrants police harassment.
Raise your hand if you thought Creed was a Christian band. It’s ok, common misunderstanding. Please redirect your attention to this new book put out by Soft Skull Press. In it you can learn about the multi-billion dollar industry of Christian pop culture, including raves, rock bands, theme parks, romance novels, and, yes, wrestling. Daniel Radosh examines eighteen towns over the U.S. and their involvement in changing monies in the sacred temple of…I mean, the Christian Pop Industry.
If you enjoy good folklore and great comic books then eat this shit for breakfast! This book contains more than twenty graphic adaptations of Native American stories of the Trickster. All cultures have tales of the trickster—a crafty creature or being who uses cunning to get food, steal precious possessions, or simply cause mischief. In Native American traditions, the trickster takes many forms, from coyote or rabbit to raccoon or raven. The first graphic anthology of Native American trickster tales, Trickster brings together Native American folklore and the world of comics.
So, at this point, we all know what a terrorist looks like, correct? And we all know to be afraid, right? Because they’re all insane, brainwashed, suicidal murderers who at any moment could go “Speed” on our asses. Well, if you’re done watching Fox News and listening to Glenn Beck go ahead and try reading this new book by Nasser Abufarha. In The Making of a Human Bomb, Nasser Abufarha, a Palestinian anthropologist, explains the cultural logic underlying Palestinian martyrdom operations (suicide attacks) launched against Israel during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-06). In so doing, he sheds much-needed light on how Palestinians have experienced and perceived the broader conflict.
Open this book and the first thing you will see : “What are you doing after the orgy or the insurrection or whatever?” I’m going to have to quote Lorna on this one. I am at a bit of a loss as to how to describe this (though i could read you some funny passages), so I will quote the Institute for Experimental Freedom: “The book is a collection of texts, images, and design sensibilities which combine insurrectional theory, critical theory, and post-structuralist inquiries about power and subjectivization with experimental fiction, flarf poetry, Brechtian pornography, and Swiss-influenced post-ironic typographic design.” Why would I choose a book I’m not really sure about for my top ten? Because I think I slept with a woman who slept with the a man who sent it to us. Just kidding, in reality this book has a lot to offer, I just haven’t finished reading it.
Diving into the political strategies of post-Civil Rights Movement African American activists in Detroit Now Is the Time! traces the complicated legacy of community activism to illuminate what is required for grassroots activists to be effective in demanding public accountability to poor and marginalized citizens. This book is relatively cheap for a University Press so pick it up, pick it up now! Before you head out for the US Social Forum or Allied Media Conference. Know something about a city before you descend upon it I say!
If you’re into understanding the “larger picture” of how our societies not only came to function but are inherently dysfunctional this is your jam. Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach for understanding the history and development of the modern world by explaining the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis.
Semiotext(e) is on a roll! And AK Press is keeping up. In addition to 
This land is your land, this land is my land from California to…Oh, apologies. I thought I was somewhere else for a moment. Right, well, on a completely unrelated note the University of California Press just released this book making a powerful case for understanding the complex, often paradoxical history of immigration restriction as we work through the issues that inform, and often distort, the debate over who can become a citizen, who decides, and on what basis. UC Berkeley might want to apply some theories from the insightful books they publish to their practices as a University. Don’t jail students for standing up to high tuition costs….T!
I decided to read