Posted on February 25th, 2010 in AK Authors!
The Guardian printed another obituary of Colin Ward earlier this week. A nice tribute to a wonderful man.
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Colin Ward obituary
by Ken Worpole
Writer, social theorist and anarchist who believed in self-sufficiency, allotments and better town planning.
Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, lived with the title of Britain’s most famous anarchist for nearly half a century, bemused by this ambivalent soubriquet. In Anarchy in Action (1973), he set out his belief that an anarchist society was not an end goal. Following Alexander Herzen, the writer and thinker known as the “father of Russian socialism”, Colin saw all distant goals as a form of tyranny and believed that anarchist principles could be discerned in everyday human relations and impulses. Within this perspective, politics was about strengthening co-operative relations and supporting human ingenuity in its myriad vernacular and everyday forms.
One of Colin’s favourite metaphors—adopted from a novel by Ignazio Silone—was the image of the seed beneath the snow, which suggested to him that anarchist principles were ever alive and prescient. He thought it was the work of politics to nurture such beliefs and to support them through small-scale initiatives, avoiding the temptation to replicate or scale them up to a level beyond which professional bureaucracies take over. He was fond of contrasting the vocabulary of self-organisation, with its friendly societies, mutuals, co-operatives and voluntary associations, with the nomenclature of the state and private sectors with their directorates, corporations, boards and executives.
Colin was the author of almost 30 books on subjects that ranged from allotments, architecture, self-build housing, children’s play, education, postcards and town planning to water distribution and anarchist theory, many of which gained him an international following. His book The Child in the City (1978), frequently reprinted, influenced planners and teachers from Liverpool to Latin America. Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (1984), written with planner Dennis Hardy, opened up a whole new field in 20th-century social history around self-organised communities and the Lockeian belief in the democratic importance of experiments in living. Another book, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1988), with David Crouch, held the line for this uniquely friendly form of local self-sufficiency during the barren years of centralised land use planning, making Colin a hero of today’s environmental activists, including the young George Monbiot.
Colin was born in Wanstead, Essex, the son of a teacher and a shorthand typist. Both were Labour supporters and Colin remembered hearing the anarchist Emma Goldman speak at a 1938 London May Day rally, and attending the 1939 Festival of Music for the People, in aid of the International Brigades, featuring Benjamin Britten’s Ballad of Heroes. On leaving school aged 15, Colin went to work for the architect Sidney Caulfield. Conscripted in 1942, Colin was posted to Glasgow, where he fell in with the city’s lively anarchist movement. He was then transferred to Orkney and Shetland for the remainder of the war. In 1945, as a subscriber to the radical newspaper War Commentary, Colin was summoned as a witness at the Old Bailey trial of the paper’s editors, John Hewetson, Vernon Richards and Philip Sansom, who were accused of promoting disaffection and received prison sentences.
Throughout the 1940s and 50s, while working for the architect Peter Shepheard, he wrote and edited articles for Freedom, the anarchist newspaper, where he developed the abiding themes of his life. He subsequently edited the journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970.
In his editorial and political work, he befriended and cultivated younger activists and writers such as Hugh Brody, Stan Cohen, Ray Gosling, Tony Gould, Richard Mabey, Carole Pateman, Kate Soper, Laurie Taylor and Jock Young. Many of these went on to write for the newly established weekly, New Society, an intellectual home that came ready-furnished as a result of Colin’s widening influence at this time.
In 1966, he had married Harriet Unwin, a young widow with two children, Tom and Barney, and in 1968 they had a son together, Ben. Colin also acted as a guardian to two other boys, Alan and Doug Balfour, after the Balfours’ mother died. This companionable, happy marriage of kindred spirits was longlasting. Colin and Harriet subsequently established a network of international friendships, first from their home in London and, latterly, in Suffolk—Colin spent a small fortune on photocopying in the local public library—as well as by telephone.
While working as an education officer for the Town and Country Planning Association between 1971 and 1979 he wrote Streetwork: The Exploding School (1973), with Tony Fyson, and established the Bulletin for Environmental Education. The point of both initiatives was to help get children out of school and into their communities, to talk to local people, and explore their neighbourhood, its amenities and utilities, and understand how buildings, streets, landscapes and social life interact. This led to Colin’s focus on the unique world of childhood which, in the end, may prove to have been his—and anarchism’s—most enduring contribution to social policy.
There were many other collaborations. With the novelist Ruth Rendell, Colin wrote a Counterblast pamphlet in 1989, Undermining the Central Line, in favour of a revitalised local democracy; in 1998 he produced Sociable Cities: Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, with the urbanist Peter Hall, to commemorate the centenary of Howard’s seminal work on garden cities. In 2003, the film-maker Mike Dibb recorded Colin in conversation with the writer Roger Deakin, at the Wards’ home in Debenham. This is available on DVD. To see Deakin (who died in 2006) and Colin together, talking freely of the delights of the natural world and the varied people in it, is to be reminded of a politics of life and possibility that stubbornly refuses to go away.
Colin is survived by Harriet, his son, stepchildren and wards.
• Colin Ward, author and social theorist, born 14 August 1924; died 11 February 2010
Posted on February 24th, 2010 in AK Distribution
Hello one and all,
In our infinite wisdom, we here at AK have decided to offer a rotating special on different AK Press published titles each month. It is what I like to think of as the “You should have bought this when it came out, but you put it off, and now you are being rewarded because it is finally on sale” Sale, and other people think of as “A Sale on AK Backlist.” Whose is more appealing? (This is a rhetorical question so please don’t tell me what I don’t want to hear.) Each month we’ll be offering a selection of titles at 50% off the regular list price. (Yes, stores, for you too!). We’ve announced these titles on sale in a couple of emails, but I just realized that, though you should be, some of you may not be signed up for those. There’s still a week for the discount! February’s little beauties are, in alphabetical order (to avoid the appearance of favouritism):
A New World in Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, edited by Roy San Filippo
This book keeps alive the many key political contributions Love and Rage made to debates surrounding anarchism and organization, race, white supremacy, and the national question, as well as documenting the rise and fall of an important political movement. Now just $6!
Controlled Flight into Terrain: , by John Yates
John is a San Francisco Bay Area independent designer, whose work has appeared for years within the underground music and political scenes. Through such work as his “Democracy We Deliver,” “Officer Friendly?” and Mom, We’re Home!”, Yates has gained a somewhat precarious notoriety within both the counter and over-the-counter cultures. Speaking of which, we’ll have some new shirts of his by mid-March! Now just $5.50! May as well get 2!
For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton, by Maurice Brinton (Christopher Pallis)
The most prolific contributor to the British Solidarity Group (1961¬1992), Maurice Brinton sought to inspire a mass movement based on libertarian socialist politics. Attempting to blow away the bad air of the “Old” and “New” Left alike, Brinton used the past as a guide to his visionary writings. Highly recommended!! Now just $11!
Granny Made Me an Anarchist: , by Stuart Christie
Oh, what can we say about this! Love this book. Stuart Christie became Britain’s most famous anarchist in 1964 when he was arrested for smuggling explosives in a plot to assassinate Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco. Charged with “Banditry and Terrorism,” he served three years of his twenty-year sentence before international pressure (from Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre among many others), as well as a note from his Mum, secured his release. Five years later, he stood trial in London for alleged involvement with Britain’s Angry Brigade. Now just $10!
Subversion of Politics: , by George Katsiaficas
The Subversion of Politics fills in the gaps between the momentous events of 1968 and 1999. Katsiaficas presents the protagonists of social revolt—Italian feminists, squatters, disarmament and anti-nuclear activists, punk rockers, and anti-fascist street fighters—in a compelling and sympathetic light.. At the same time, he offers a work of great critical depth, drawing from these political practices a new theory of freedom and autonomy that redefines the parameters of the political itself. Now just $9!
Suffled How it Gush: A North American Anarchist in the Balkans, by Shon Meckfessel
Shon Meckfessel, AKA “the fourth hiker,” 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. Now just $8.50!
What is Anarchism, by Alexander Berkman
You thought it was just going to be books by young whippersnappers, didn’t you? A reprint of perhaps the first and best exposition of anarchism by one of its greatest propagandists (by both word and deed) and thinkers. In a clear conversation with the reader, Berkman discusses society as it now exists, the need for anarchism, and the methods for bringing it about. Necessary! Now just $7.00!
Posted on February 23rd, 2010 in Happenings
The editors of AK’s brand-new Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex have started promoting this important new critique of modern-era McCarthyism on our university campuses, and are calling for all folks concerned with the preservation of the freedom to speak and think as an autonomous individual in higher education to organize events around the book. If you’re on the East Coast, you might want to check out one of these two events organized by editor Anthony Nocella. Or, if you’re interested in organizing your own release events for Academic Repression, get in contact with the editors here: http://www.myspace.com/academicrepression. You’ll find a full list of contributors to the book on the MySpace page, plus info on other events coming up in the next few weeks! Be sure to check it out!
“This courageous and chilling book reminds us that the Academy is always a context for intellectual exchange and political struggle. Don’t miss it!” –Cornel West, Princeton University
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Book Release Party: Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic Industrial Complex
Thursday, March 4, 7-8:30 p.m. Grewen Auditorium, Grewen Hall, Le Moyne College, NY
Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic Industrial Complex addresses the ways in which political elites, the mass media, and the education system establish and police the parameters of acceptable discourse. Throughout this anthology, prominent academics address the numerous debates that have occurred over free speech, culture wars and academic freedom.
Contributors to the book who will speak at the event include: Anthony J. Nocella, II of Le Moyne College, Peter Castro, Ph.D., Micere Githae Mugo, Ph.D., Mark Rupert, Ph.D., and Liat Ben-Moshe of Syracuse University, and Caroline Kaltefleiter, Ph.D. of the State University of New York at Cortland. Following the event, copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. This event is free and open to the public.
It is sponsored by the Center for Urban and Regional Applied Research, Department of Anthropology, Criminology and Sociology, and the Office of Service Learning. For more information, call (315)657-2911.
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Book Talk: Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic Industrial Complex
Saturday March 6th 7:00PM
with co-editor Anthony J. Nocella, II
@ Wooden Shoe Books
704 South Street
Philadelphia PA 19147
215-413-0999
sabot@woodenshoebooks.com
www.woodenshoebooks.com
Since 9/11, the Bush administration has pressured universities to hand over faculty, staff, and student work to be flagged for potential threats. Numerous books have addressed the question of academic freedom over the years; this collection asks whether the concept of academic freedom still exists at all in the American university system. It addresses not only overt attacks on critical thinking, but also–following trends unfolding for decades–engages the broad socioeconomic determinants of academic culture.
This edited anthology brings together prominent academics writing hard-hitting essays on free speech, culture wars, and academic freedom in a post-9/11 era. It’s a powerful response to attacks on critical thinking in our universities by well-respected scholars and academics, including Joy James, Henry Giroux, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Robert Jensen, Ward Churchill, and many more..
“Essential reading for anyone concerned about the stifling of dissent and free expression in academia and beyond.”–Uri Gordon, author of Anarchy Alive!
Anthony J. Nocella, II, author, activist, education, is a professor in Sociology and Criminology at SUNY Cortland and Le Moyne College. He also is a life skills teacher at Hillbrook Youth Detention Center promoting nonviolence and group-building skills. He is a co-founder of more than fifteen active social/political organizations, four active scholarly journals, is board member of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), has published more than twenty-five scholarly articles and is working on his eleventh book, Global Industrial Complex (Lexington Books, coming soon). His other books include A Peacemaker’s Guide for Building Peace with a Revolutionary Group (PARC, 2004), co-editor of Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (Lantern Books, 2004); and co-editor of Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press, 2006). www.anthonynocella.org
Posted on February 22nd, 2010 in AK News
In the world of publishing, it’s sometimes kind of staggering to realize how far in advance we have to announce a new season of books. The book trade generally works 8 – 12 months in advance … which frequently requires a lot of creative thinking about how a list of books that’s going to be ready for printing might come together, and, frequently, a really big leap of faith, and a lot of crossed fingers, that a manuscript that is close to being finished will actually be finished on time. As you might have noticed on one or two occasions, we’re sometimes overly optimistic on that front!
Nonetheless! The collective agreed on an awesome list of books for the Fall 2010 season (books to be released between September 2010 & March 2011), and over the course of the past couple of weeks, Zach and Charles and I have been driving ourselves crazy pulling together covers, page counts, prices, release dates, and advance descriptions. And now you get to see it first! Even Amazon doesn’t have this info yet … don’t you feel special?
Seriously, some great books in here. We’re excited about the Fall season – and the rest of the Spring 2010 season! – so read on below, and be sure to keep an eye out for these titles as they become available throughout the year!
The AK Press Fall 2010 Season
Mountain Justice: Homegrown Resistance to Mountaintop Removal, for the Future of Us All, by Tricia Shapiro
Mountain Justice tells a terrific set of firsthand stories about living with MTR and offers on-the-scene—and behind-the-scenes—reporting of what people are doing to try to stop it. Shapiro lets the victims of mountaintop removal and their allies tell their own stories, allowing moments of quiet dignity and righteous indignation to share center-stage. Includes coverage of the sharp escalation of anti-MTR civil disobedience, with more than 130 arrests in West Virginia alone, during the first year of the Obama administration.
“Shapiro is one of the few writers on this subject that actually understands the strategy, the tactics, and the internal politics of a dynamic and growing movement. This is environmental journalism at it best.”—Mike Roselle, Earth First! founder and author of Tree Spiker
Tricia Shapiro has been closely following and writing about efforts to end large-scale strip mining for coal in Appalachia since 2004. She now lives on a remote mountain homestead in western North Carolina, near the Tennessee border.
September 2010 | 360 pages | $17.95
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“Yellow Kid” Weil: The Autobiography of America’s Master Swindler, by J.R. Weil
Bilked bankers, grifted gamblers, and swindled spinsters. Welcome to the world of confidence men.
You’ll marvel at the elaborate schemes developed by The Yellow Kid and cry for the marks who lost it all to his ingenuity—$8,000,000 by some estimations. Fixed horse races, bad real-estate deals, even a money-making machine, were all tools of the trade for the Kid and his associates: The Swede, The Butterine Kid, The Harmony Kid, Fats Levine, and others. The Sting (1973), starring Paul Newman and based largely on the story of the Yellow Kid is entertaining, but no match for the real deal.
The triumphant return of the much-beloved Nabat Series!
February 2011 | 352 pages | $17.95
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Flash: A Novel, By Jim Miller
“’This remarkable novel is nothing less than a secret history of Southern California—a radical past that might yet redeem our future.”—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz
A chance encounter with a faded Wanted! poster in a San Diego library sends journalist Jack Wilson on a wild adventure through southern California’s radical past. As Jack searches for the truth about I.W.W. outlaw Bobby Flash, he uncovers a hidden history of real-life revolutionaries … and learns a powerful lesson about the importance of family in the process.
The very first title in AK’s brand-new fiction line! Keep your eyes peeled for more great fiction titles coming your way in future seasons.
Jim Miller is a labor educator and activist in San Diego, California.
November 2010 | pages | $13.95
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Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, by Marshall “Eddie” Conway
In 1970, the feds framed Eddie Conway for the murder of a Baltimore City Police officer. He was 24 years old. They threw him in prison, took him away from his family, his friends, and his organizing, and tried to relegate him to a life marked by nothing but legal appeals, riots and lockdowns, transfers from one penal colony to the next. But they failed.
Forty years later, still incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit, Eddie Conway continues to resist. Marshall Law is a poignant story of strength and struggle. From his childhood in inner-city Baltimore to his political awakening in the military, from the rise of the Black Panther Party to the sham trial, the realities of prison life, escape attempts, labor organizing on the inside, and beyond, Eddie’s autobiography is a reminder that we all share the responsibility of resistance, no matter where we are.
Marshall “Eddie” Conway is the former Minister of Defense of the Baltimore Black Panther Party. In 1969, he uncovered evidence of the FBI’s infiltration of the Panthers as a part of the COINTELPro initiative, and found himself locked away, just one year later, convicted of a murder he did not commit. Currently in his fortieth year of incarceration in a State of Maryland correctional facility, he has played a leading role in a variety of prisoner support initiatives, including the formation of the Maryland chapter of the United Prisoner’s Labor Union, and the ACLU’s Prison Committee to Correct Prison Conditions.
February 2011 | 232 pages | $15.95
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We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008, edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and Void Network
On December 6, 2008 the city of Athens exploded as people took to the streets to demonstrate their rage over the murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, bringing business as usual to a screeching, burning halt for three breathtaking weeks. This is the first book to delve into the Greek December and its aftermath, in the words of those who witnessed and participated in it. Interviews and personal reflections run alongside the communiqués and texts that circulated through the networks of revolt, shedding much-needed light—and dispelling destructive myths—on the real fabric of the Greek left that made December possible.
Note that this book will actually be available in just a few short weeks … and is available for preorder on our website! But, it’s officially a part of our Fall 2010 season.
March 2010 | 360 pages | $17.00
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Fear of an Animal Planet: The Secret History of Animal Resistance, by Jason Hribal
“Until the lion has his historian,” the African proverb goes, “the hunter will always be a hero.” Jason Hribal fulfills this promise and turns the world upside down. Taking the reader deep inside the circus, the zoo, and similar operations, it provides a window into hidden struggle and resistance that occurs daily. Chimpanzees escape their cages. Elephants attack their trainers. Orcas demand more food. Tigers refuse to perform. Indeed, these animals are rebelling with intent and purpose. They become true heroes and our understanding of them will never be the same.
The latest title in the ever-popular CounterPunch Series at AK Press.
Jason Hribal is an independent historian and adult educator.
December 2010 | 280 pages | $15.95
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Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States, edited by Team Colors Collective
From housing struggles to food politics, from poor people’s movements to radical art projects, from the Right to the City Alliance to the U.S. Social Forum, Uses of a Whirlwind explores the current composition of social movements in the United States. With equal emphasis placed on movement history and movement-building, Whirlwind is a call to action for a new decade of organizing. Contributors include Robin DG Kelley, Grace Lee Boggs, Michael Hardt, Chris Carlsson, Take Back the Land, Domestic Workers United, the Starbucks Workers Union, Brian Tokar, Dorothy Kidd, and Ashanti Alston.
The book launches this June at the US Social Forum in Detroit!
Team Colors is a geographically-dispersed militant research collective. The present collection is edited by Craig Hughes, Kevin van Meter, and Stevie Peace.
June 2010 | 352 pages | $19.95
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Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures , 1960s to Now, edited by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee
Drawn from an exhibition at NYC’s Exit Art, Signs of Change is a visual archive of more than 350 posters, prints, photographs, films, songs, and ephemera from over twenty countries. From the rise of the reproducible poster to today’s digital instantaneity, it tackles the themes and representation of international struggles for equality, democracy, and freedom—as well as basic human rights, like food and shelter—and illustrates the incredible aesthetic range of radical movements over the past 50 years.
Long-awaited! Signs of Change won’t dissapoint …
Dara Greenwald is a doctoral student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Josh MacPhee is the editor of Realizing the Impossible.
September 2010 | 178 pages (full-color!) | $28.95
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Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader, edited by Chris Wilbert and Damian White
“Britain’s leading anarchist philosopher.” —Anne Power, London School of Economics
Drawing inspiration from the everyday creativity of ordinary people, Colin Ward long championed a unique social and environmental politics premised on the possibilities of democratic self-organization and self management from below. This collection provides a wide-ranging overview of Ward’s earliest journalism, with seminal essays, extracts from his most important books as well as examples of his most recent work.
Chris Wilbert is a Lecturer in Geography / Tourism at Anglia Ruskin University.
Damian F. White is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Rhode Island School of Design.
January 2011 | 375 pages | $21.95
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Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader, edited by Iain McKay
More influential than Marx during his lifetime, Proudon’s work has been long out of print or unavailable in English. Iain McKay’s comprehensive collection, is a much needed and timely historical corrective.
“An indispensable source book for anyone interested in Proudhon’s ideas and the origins of the socialist and anarchist movements in nineteenth-century Europe.” —Robert Graham, editor of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas
“Iain McKay’s introduction offers a sure-footed guide through the misconceptions surrounding Proudhon’s thought.”— Mark Leier, author of Bakunin: The Creative Passion
Published in honor of the 170th anniversary of Proudhon’s first use of the term “anarchist”!
Iain McKay is the author of An Anarchist FAQ.
December 2010 | 670 pages | $24.95
Posted on February 20th, 2010 in Reviews of AK Books
The erstwhile Indypendent, the organ of the NYC Independent Media Center, recently ran an interview of our (fairly) new release, You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of CLR James. You can read it below…and you should also check out the Indypendent’s web site here. They’re produced by a large network of volunteers and they do great work, producing a true alternative to corporate media, and reaching more than 200,000 readers! Check ’em out.
*****
Your Own James: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James
By Rico Cleffi
From the February 19, 2010 issue of the Indypendent
You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James
AK Press, 2009
C.L.R. James and David Austin (editor)
Martin Glaberman, a longtime associate of C.L.R. James, once observed that the staggering scope of James’ writing often meant, “Everyone produces his/her own James. People have, over the years, taken from him what they found useful, and imputed to him what they found necessary. James as cultural critic, James as master of the classics, James as expert on cricket, James as historian, James as major figure in the pan-African movement….”
A cursory glance at You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, mostly a collection of talks delivered to a group of West Indian students living in Montreal from 1966 to 1967, shows the breadth of James’ interests (the book is supplemented with interviews with James and letters from, to and about the scholar). Among the topics discussed are Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire as it relates to the Caribbean; the Haitian Revolution, Shakespeare’s King Lear, the making of the Caribbean people, and Lenin’s views on labor unions.
James, a Marxist journalist, essayist and social theorist, is perhaps best known for his 1938 masterwork on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. He made it his life’s work to examine the movement of historical forces from below and the response of those in power to these efforts. Lectures “The Making of the Caribbean People” and “The Haitian Revolution and the Making of the Modern World,” both included in You Don’t Play with Revolution, revisit this theme, which, given the current tragedy in Haiti, is as important as ever. James ties together the ways slaves organized themselves in order to run the West Indian plantations, the amazing defeat of the British army at the hands of the Haitians in 1791, the Haitian revolution and its importance to the French Revolution. He extends the analysis to emphasize the role of the creative resistance of American slaves in inspiring the abolitionist movement.
A close study of Black Americans had helped James, who was born in 1901 in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British colony, arrive at some of his most important theoretical breakthroughs, particularly his rejection of the Leninist concept of the vanguard party. In 1938, at the behest of Leon Trotsky and his U.S. lieutenant James P. Cannon, James came to the United States from London largely to help the Socialist Workers Party determine its stance on the “Negro Question.” He came to the conclusion that American Blacks didn’t need to have a Leninist organization imposed on them and soon rejected the entire notion of the revolutionary vanguard.
James grapples with Lenin’s writings on labor as well. The book dedicates three chapters to James’ views on “Lenin and the Trade Union Debate in Russia,” which lays out a close reading of Lenin’s public statements on the need for workers’ autonomy. This view directly contradicted that of Trotsky, who argued for more bureaucracy and increased state control over workers’ organizations (and later for the militarization of the working class). It’s impossible to accept Lenin’s proclamations at face value — in practice, Lenin and the Bolsheviks beefed up the power of the Bolshevik party at the expense of the Soviets (workers’ councils) and other workers’ organizations. David Austin, the book’s editor, could have provided a note to clarify James’ apparent Lenin paradox — even though James rejected Lenin’s idea of the vanguard party, he believed that Lenin only used that organizational form out of necessity. Kent Worcester explains in his excellent C.L.R. James: A Political Biography, “A pronounced sympathy for Lenin’s own method and practice did not, it seems, preclude a break with a core proposition of Marxist-Leninist politics.”
Many of those James worked with or directly influenced attained some degree, however compromised, of state power — Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams and Jomo Kenyatta, the first prime ministers of Ghana, Trinidad and Kenya, respectively, maintained close contact with James throughout their political careers. None of these figures is dealt with uncritically here. Throughout the volume, James’ jabs at Williams, like his digs against Trotsky, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Isaac Deutscher, never come across as petty resentment. Through debating and arguing against these characters, he earned his stripes (and his snipes).
The spectrum of these lectures can be a bit daunting, but the book’s breadth makes the collection useful to both novices looking for a starting point and initiates alike. Still, the inclusion of a much-needed index at the expense of some of the correspondence between some of James’ obscure acolytes would have made the book easier to digest.
[You can find Rico Cleffi’s original review here.]
Posted on February 19th, 2010 in AK Allies, AK Distribution, Happenings
Wendy-O Matik, radical love activist and author of Redefining Our Relationships: Guidelines For Responsible Open Relationships, recently held one of her famous workshops at AK Press. I used the opportunity to do a brief interview…
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Hey Wendy, thanks for taking the time to chat it up with us today. How are you? How is your current tour going?
Hi Macio! Thanks so much for your interest in my radical love work. I’m beaming with enthusiasm and radical love inoculations, even after 7 years of peddling polyamory workshops across the globe.
So, you have just completed a radical love workshop at the AK Press warehouse. Tell us, what are your favorite parts about these workshops? Do you have a least favorite part?
My favorite part of the radical love workshop is visibility. There’s this critical moment when a group of total strangers begin to look around the room and acknowledge that they are not alone, we’re not alone, we’re in it together, and we are all struggling to figure out our unique relationships and it is extremely validating. I am deeply grateful to play some small role in bringing people together to create allies and building community support.
My least favorite or most challenging aspect of my workshop is being a facilitator. It can very challenging to occasionally deal with people who frequently dominate a discussion, or people who give unsolicited advice or try to solve someone’s issues. I also get disappointed when I’ve spent the greater part of my work dedicated to how radical love is linked to social justice, revolution, and saving the planet, and still most folks default to sex and juggling multiple sexual partners. I am, of course, more interested in love and intimacy, not sex and sexual conquest. I am committed to smashing patriarchy and relationship heirarchies whenever possible.
These workshops have followed the continued success of your book Redefining Our Relationships. It has been about eight years since it was first published. Are there any lessons you have learned since that would drastically alter any fundamentals in the book? Anything you would add to it?
The workshop is based on the major concepts in my book, but each workshop is definitely the application of open relationships in practice. The workshops offer non-judgment space to tackle our common emotional struggles with juggling more than one love or partner and the workshop fills this need in the community. Some day, I do hope to do a second edition, where I would like to develop at greater length this notion of how the practice of loving more is not just focused on people but also a critical part of loving the planet. Radical love has come to embody a form of political, social, and environmental justice for me, deepening over the years. The tendency for more poly folks to focus on sex, and while sex may be a delicious and fun part of open relationships, it fails to tap into our innate ability to love all species, non-humans and the planet. The radical love philosophy is also an opportunity to save the planet, heal Mother Earth, connect with the cosmos, and work towards envisioning and creating a sustainable community. Radical love has, at this core, an innately spiritual component, centered on global family, a sacred global interconnection.
For example, with respect to radical love activism, I am currently committed to a letter-writing campaign where I write passionate love letters to political activists, environmentalists, political prisoners, artists, journalists, and anyone who has been jailed or exiled for their beliefs or for speaking truth to power. I write love letters to people from all over the world. I also write love letters to US soldiers serving in Iraq in an attempt to persuade them towards peaceful and diplomatic ways for solving our problems abroad.
I also want to take this moment to recognize and speak aloud my awareness around the issue of white privilege, class, and sexuality and the undeniable freedom and choices that are afforded to me because of this privilege. I bring this up because, as a white woman, the issue of race affects all of us personally, and I want to maintain awareness around a progressive poly agenda. It’s been very challenging for me to accept and be reminded that something that feels so liberating to me also retains the same institutional oppressions as the mainstream culture. It is my hope that each of us takes note of this oppressive conditioning and excavates it more fully in your own lives and relationships. It is my hope that I use my privilege thoughtfully and respectfully to facilitate a relationship workshop that brings people of all backgrounds together–be it race, class, gender, religion, disability–to discuss our emotions and challenges. It is my intention to create a non-judgmental space to support each other, perhaps for the first time for many of us. Let’s remember to address white privilege in every aspect of our lives and to carry it into our discussions at home and out there in our community at large.
What are some of your life experiences that have ushered you toward the idea of loving openly and without bounds?
As a child, I was taught to love everyone. As an adult, I still do. I’m an activist of the heart. I have always felt as if I have an enormous capacity to love everyone—the homeless guy down the street, the little old lady next door, someone I just had a 5-hour mind-blowing conversation with, and then, of course, my friends, lovers, and family. When I finally was able to admit to myself (without guilt) that I have a human right and obligation to myself to love as many people as I wanted or needed, then I became aware of how a monogamous relationship, outlined by the status quo, was never going to work for me. I would never be able to conform. Radical love, or the freedom to love who you want, how you want, and as many as you want, has become a way of life for me. Responsible open relationships seek to challenge patriarchy, the media, and our coerced social constructs of a relationship by imagining a non-hierarchical approach to love. As you redefine larger concepts like love, intimacy, sex, and relationships for yourself, you begin to disrupt the shackles of status quo that limit and restrict us from having healthier and more satisfying connections.
In your travels and talks do you have a sense of certain communities becoming more open to the idea of radical love? If not, why? Which communities?
Everywhere I’ve traveled or people I have connected with—from Canada to the US to Australia to Malaysia—are hungry for new relationship models. Many of them are already practicing different kind of open relationship structures and are eager to find others to connect with and discuss openly their unique experiences.
Understandably, going against the grain of how we have been trained to love requires us to confront a lot of inner demons. What are some quick tips for people out there attempting trying to maintain open relationships but running into fears around jealousy, loneliness and other insecurities?
Quick tips:
- Read everything you can on the topic of open relationships, jealousy, setting boundaries, communication skills, and building self-esteem.
- Join or create a poly support group via online, chat-rooms, forums, or in your community locally.
- Find workshops and presentations on the topic of open relationships and polyamory. Bring your questions and issues to these gatherings.
- If you’re really struggling emotionally, find a poly-friendly therapist who can help you navigate those difficult issues that you’re facing.
Through your experience, what are some of the most common reasons people choose open relationships over exclusive monogamous relationships )
Many of us cannot keep our hearts under lock and key. Many of us cannot restrain our desires to love many people and to want to explore those attractions more fully and intimately. Many of us feel that one person cannot fulfill all our needs. Many of us understand that instead of cheating and lying, we can find healthy and transparent ways to communicate our desire to be loving with other people. Many of us are hard-wired to love more than just one partner and find monogamy to be very restrictive, controlling, co-dependent, and disabling of our freedom to share our love with others. Many of us feel that monogamy is no guarantee that a person will stay with you forever.
For less of a field-study question: Why would someone choose to have an open relationship over an exclusive monogamous relationship?
Speaking only for myself, life is too short to not love many people. I have an enormous capacity to love, to cultivate intimate, meaningful, passionate connections with more than one person. I have never been one to hoard love—it is meant to be given away, shared, and passed along.
Any regrets? (about what? I don’t know! )
No, on the contrary, even after the loss of a 13-year open relationship/marriage, I came to learn how thankful I was for keeping my heart open to other lovers. They were there to help me through the most difficult transition in my life and their love and support fueled my belief and conviction as a radical love warrior for open relationships.
I attended a workshop of yours back in ’08 at the Longhaul and recall you speaking of open love not only positively transforming the ways we live our individual lives but also having an impact on the larger injustices of capitalism and the patriarchal pyramid of oppression and exploitation. Tell us a little about how you see one having an affect on the other.
Radical love has the potential to shift the dominant paradigm, to embrace institutional change and to dismantle systems of oppression, such as capitalism, greed, and patriarchy, but only if we’re interested in smashing the system and rebuilding it with a more holistic paradigm to replace it. As a feminist and anarchist in spirit, open relationships go to the very core of patriarchy and threaten to disrupt men’s historical control over how we love, who we love, how many we love, and so on.
The societal and cultural reality is that we are a far cry from sexual equality in this day and age. Men, straight or gay, have benefited from the luxury of sexual liberation without so much as their moral values being scrutinized by society. Women, whether straight or queer, have no such freedom. Labels such as “slut” or “nympho” continue to plague women who seek sexual autonomy. These stereotypes and misconceptions are perpetuated in the media, government, educational system, religious institutions, and even within the women’s movement. We still have a long way to go before we can dismantle these derogatory perceptions and liberate ourselves from the social constraints that have been imposed upon us since birth. The first place to start is with one’s self, confronting your own self-imposed guilt and your fears of stepping outside the standards of societal norms. It starts with freeing your mind, body, and heart to love openly despite judgment.
Who are some of the most influential authors in your approach to relationships & love?
To name just a few:
- The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities by Dossie Easton & Catherine A. Liszt
- Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet by Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio
- Living My Life: An Autobiography by Emma Goldman
- Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino
- Polyamory: The New Love without Limits by Dr. Deborah M. Anapol
Wendy, aside from an abundance of workshops, talks and interviews are there any other exciting projects your fans can look forward to seeing from you?
Hopefully, a second edition some day to come. I’m considering a poly blog, but my activist side prefers to spend my life outside, fueling the radical love revolution, rather than hooked up to the computer. I’m not sure I’ve figured out a way to do radical love and bring down civilization, without turning off my computer!
Before you get out of here there are some personal questions our readers would like to know:
Where are you from? Ever think of leaving the Bay Area ?
I was born in Pomona, CA—17 years. I’ve lived in the Bay Area for over 20 years, and I am currently trying to move back to Sonoma County to live on land in community, grow my own food, and keep my hands in the dirt as much as possible.
What are your plans for Valentines day? You don’t have to reveal if any surprises will be ruined!
I dislike the consumerist and materialistic side of V-Day, unless were talking Pussy Power. But I do coincidently have a massage date with a lover on Feb. 14th.
Lastly, something I’m sure everyone is dying to know: what is your sign?
I was born July 19, 1966 at 4:01pm in Covina, CA. I am a Cancerian Warrior for Love with my Uranus-Pluto conjunction at the Midheaven, while my Venus squares Saturn.
Posted on February 18th, 2010 in About AK
[Are you an established or aspiring writer interested in the history of anarchism?
If so, please check out the following call for submissions.
It looks like a great project! ]
Call for submissions: Anarchy now! Maps, ideas and stories of libertarian movements in the contemporary world
English Translation: Leslie Ray
Quaderni della Rivista storica dell’anarchismo [Notebooks of the Historical Review of Anarchism], issue 5 (Autumn 2010)
published by BFS edizioni, Pisa (Italy)
Interpretive Framework:
Half a century of anarchy—this was the title that Armando Borghi gave to his memoirs, which documented the history of Italian anarchism from the late nineteenth century up to WWII. Published in 1954, his work periodized anarchism’s “classical” period: born of the First International, it entered a phase of bombings and regicide at the end of the century, and then came to have a significant presence in cultural debates and political and social movements in the early twentieth century. Anarchists actively participated in revolutionary movements (in Mexico, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Spain) and engaged with the dawning of mass society through the development of the libertarian press and direct-action syndicalism.
Over the course of just a few years, the defeat of the revolution in Spain, the Second World War, and the establishment of Bolshevik hegemony in Eastern Europe brought anarchism’s “epic,” internationalist phase to an end. The Cold War, the difficult post-war reconstruction, the subsequent economic boom built upon America’s Fordist production model, and the development of the welfare state in the main advanced societies in Europe and North America radically modified the social, political, and cultural framework in which anarchists acted, and made it increasing difficulty for them to find spaces for initiatives, particularly in a world dominated by the clash between the United States and the Soviet Union. Not coincidentally, most anti-colonialist movements around the globe took a pro-Soviet, pro-Chinese mould as their reference rather than looking to the “heretical” libertarian currents of the Western leftwing.
However, in the sixties, contradictions in the new social, political, and economic model led to the birth of significant and diverse protest movements with new characteristics. The critique of bureaucratic society and the crystallization of roles in the age of super powers became a critique of hierarchy and power generally, contributing to the development of new ways of engaging in politics and “alternative” lifestyles. It was 1968. In this context, there was a remarkable rediscovery of the classical themes of anarchism, often reinterpreted in light of the cultural transformations under way. New practices, concerns, and symbols emerged from the combination of anarchism’s epic themes and the movements of counterculture. It became possible to talk of a “neo-anarchism.”
This international phenomenon had common features in Western countries, as well as in Eastern Europe and some “developing” countries—although each country had peculiarities—and the tendency gradually consolidated itself in the decades that followed. From the seventies to the nineties, a series of themes (ecology, anti-militarism, self-government, feminism) and practices (squatted homes and social centers, agricultural communes, self-governing syndicalism, municipalism, and ecological lifestyles) became elements of the anarchist lexicon, together with dynamic new cultural and artistic movements (such as punk). Anarchist symbols and practices also had a presence in the mass movements that developed over those years: from the labor organizing to campaigns against nuclear weapons and military bases and the anti-war movements.
Radical changes that occurred at the end of the century opened up new scenarios: 1989 and the collapse of “really existing socialism”; economic globalization; the computer revolution and the birth of the Internet, etc. A series of new movements emerged following the five hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of America (1992), in the wake of the indigenous mobilizations that challenged the iniquitous international distribution of resources and neoliberal economic policies. Zapatismo in the Mexican region of Chiapas was an example of this: the rediscovery and reinvention of the egalitarian traditions of the indigenous peoples and campesinos, the rejection of the traditional party structures typical of the Cold War, and global action through the new communicational networks. At the same time, the rediscovered freedom of expression and organization throughout the post-Soviet Eastern Europe ignited hopes for the birth of libertarian movements and cultures. This global process was encapsulated by anarchists’ prominence at the protests at the international trade summits, starting with Seattle 1999.
The passage into the twenty-first century was tinged with dark tones: from the death of Carlo Giuliani in Genoa in 2001 to the Twin Towers, the Western world saw the growth of politics of exclusion, racism, and authoritarianism, while new wars spread blood across a by-now multi-polar world, amid the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and despotic systems. At the same time, hopes for change in post-Soviet Eastern Europe waned, making way for the transition to market capitalism, the birth of new autocracies, the development of new mafias, and civil wars (even in the heart of Europe, with the long conflict in the former Yugoslavia). The global economic crisis, anticipated by the collapse of the Argentine economy in 2002 and environmental problems helped destroy the few remaining certainties of a world that needed to reinvent itself but seem unable to do so, even as the fires in Greece during Christmas 2008 marked the presence of sizable but “marginal” radical and anti-authoritarian sensibilities and movements among young people.
The Project:
The “Quaderni della Rivista storica dell’anarchismo,” a project of the magazine of the same name (1994-2004) are annual monographic publications by BFS Edizioni and the Biblioteca Franco Serantini – centro di storia libertaria, sociale e contemporanea [Franco Serantini Library – Center for Libertarian, Social, and Contemporary History]. We plan to devote the 2010 quaderno [notebook] to studies of the new forms of anarchism that appeared internationally in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly since 1968, into the early years of the twenty-first century. We are interested in investigating the development of anarchism after its “classical,” epic period in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The project’s historical approach in an attempt to avoid a purely “militant” angle, aiming rather at an analysis of the new cultures, practices, and social, labor, and political movements that have emerged over this long and complex period. A research project with various contributors from around the globe, it aims to deal with the topic from an international perspective, identifying the peculiar characteristics of each macro-area examined and the main issues that have affected it.
(more…)
Posted on February 17th, 2010 in AK Book Excerpts
Oh, and did we mention there’s yet another AK Press title on its way from the printer to our warehouse? And I mean that literally: It should be in a truck and nearing Oakland as I type.
The book is Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic-Industrial Complex. According to Cornel West, “This courageous and chilling book reminds us that the Academy is always a context for intellectual exchange and political struggle. Don’t miss it!”
Sure, a lot of books have addressed attacks on academic freedom over the years, but this collection asks whether the concept of academic freedom itself still exists at all in the American university system. It addresses not only overt attacks on critical thinking, but also—following trends unfolding for decades—engages the broad socioeconomic determinants of academic culture. It’s full of hard-hitting essays on free speech, culture wars, and academic “freedom” in a post-9/11 era. It’s a powerful response to attacks on critical thinking in our universities by scholars on the front lines of this ongoing battle, many of whom have experienced academic repression first-hand, including Michael Bérubé, Joy James, Henry Giroux, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Robert Jensen, Cary Nelson, Ward Churchill, and many more.
And, for the next month, you can get it for 25% off!
To whet your appetite, here’s an excerpt: two, actually. One lifted from the beginning of and the other from near the end of the editors’ Introduction.
——
Introduction: The Rise of the Academic-Industrial Complex and the Crisis in Free Speech
by Steven Best, Anthony J. Nocella, II, and Peter McLaren
“[People] fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin—more even than death…. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of [humanity]” —Bertrand Russell
“There follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the path of inquiry.” —Charles S. Peirce
Given that the academy is a microcosm of social life in the US, and this nation—as a hierarchical, exploitative capitalist society—has never been free or democratic in any meaningful way, we should not be surprised to find higher education to be a place of hierarchical domination, bureaucratic control, hostility to radical research and teaching, and anathema to free thinking. Since Socrates and the earliest inceptions of the university system in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, Western states and universities have attacked critical minds and kicked controversial and subversive figures out of the hallowed halls of learning, betraying the very mission of education and critical thinking that demands freedom of inquiry and speech.
Perhaps the largest myths to expose in our culture today still are freedom and democracy—institutional and personal conditions that are not only in steep decline in the current post-9/11 era, but in fact never existed in any significant form. The revolutionary experiment in democracy and equality launched in 1776 never had a chance, taking place as it did amidst the backdrop of the slavery of African people, the repression and impending genocide of the Native American peoples, the disenfranchisement of women, the institutionalization of people with disabilities, and the exploitation of working classes. The Founding Fathers never intended “democracy,” “freedom,” and “equality” to benefit anything but their own elite propertied interests, and history stayed faithful to their design. Despite the subversion of monarchy and aristocracy with the brash and impertinent notion of equality, the concept mainly functioned as an ideological smokescreen to mask a new form of hierarchy based on class domination, coupled with patriarchy, racism, and every other repulsive form of discrimination, subjugation, and violence. Notions such as “freedom” and “equality” hid the fact that the inherently hierarchical and exploitative corporate-state complex of capitalism was a system run by and for capitalists, corporations, and wealthy property owners. Big business and monopoly corporations commandeered the state—the oxymoronic institution of “representative democracy”—to advance and protect their own minority interests, to suppress majority opposition, and to quell dissent by any means necessary….
***
Neoliberalism and Academia
It was not paranoia that led John Dewey in the 1940s to warn that a corporatization process had begun whereby universities learned to shape and pattern themselves on a business model driven by the need to compete and turn education into a profit-making enterprise. Nor was it delusional when, in 1961, President Eisenhower warned that the “military industrial complex” posed a threat to the balance of powers and to civil liberties. The fusion of warfare, capitalism, science, and technology cannot take place without knowledge, advanced technologies, and a low-cost labor base, such as one finds ready-made in universities and their graduate student labor pools. Where science, engineering, and technology are crucial to capitalist militarism and militarist capitalism, universities form the third leg in a triadic system of postmodern power. It is a telling fact that the US spends more in the military sector than the rest of the world combined.
Consequently, deconstructing fictitious humanist ideals, describing the real goals and imperatives of “higher learning,” and delegitimizing the power systems that actually run universities, many theorists during the last two decades understood that the boundary lines between universities, corporations, and military/warfare/social policing systems were dissolving. They no longer saw three separate, unrelated entities, but rather one gigantic industrial complex. The term “academic-military-industrial complex” is shorthand for the intersection, overlapping, and implosion of universities, the corporate private sector, the Department of Defense and various armed forces services, and the security and regulatory apparatuses of the State—all knotted together in a vast, predatory bureaucratic system developed for social and geopolitical domination.1/2 By the 1990s, certainly, the questioning of scientific epistemology took on a far broader and more consequential term with critical scrutiny of the university institution itself, by charting the transformations of the mission and function of universities in the post-war era. Building on attacks on the politics of knowledge driving university research, a number of radical theorists, such as Stanley Aronowitz, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Sandra Harding, and numerous contributors to this book analyzed how the nobler purposes and missions of universities and institutions of “higher learning” became corrupted and degraded. Hence, a spate of important new critical works emerged deconstructing the mythology of higher education and the academy as an institution.
As capitalism changes, so must education, and the rise of science and technology to dominant “productive forces” in the postindustrial phase of capital transforms education increasingly from a focus on humanities to narrow functional knowledge. The noble functions of higher education such as inculcating critical thinking skills, identities as citizens and members of interdependent communities, and the ability to meaningfully participate in and shape a democratic form of government gave way to reconfiguring the university as a corporation, ideological state apparatus, and technical school for training laborers.
Universities had become part of the “one dimensional society” (Marcuse), they had the potential to devastatingly criticize and overturn in favor of richly educated, highly cultured, autonomous citizens. Increasingly, the humanities and liberal arts were eclipsed by science, chemistry, mathematics, agriculture, geology, engineering, marketing, business, accounting, advertising, and other fields including sports. The economic rationale to increase university profits and functional purpose of producing individuals trained for science, technology, and business had the ideological bonus of homogenizing thought and stifling critical thinking. And under conditions of economic recession such as began to devastate global markets in 2008, universities have to tighten budgets and reduce or eliminate “superfluous” knowledges. Simultaneously, students increasingly turn toward practical realities of careers and economic survival and forego the “luxury” of studying literature, philosophy, or art, fields that regardless are grossly underfunded as they occupy the bottom rung of budgetary priorities. As the 2008–2009 crisis worsened, plunging much of the globe into recession and depression, worried students fall in line with corporate academic policies that reduce or eliminate “superfluous” humanities requirements in order to peddle degrees in marketable careers.
Partly due to economic constraints and partly because of the growing hegemony of technoscience, it is hard to miss the implosion between universities and vocational schools that eliminate liberal arts requirements and do little more than job training and indoctrinating students with capitalist values of competition, individualism, materialism, greed, and so on. Vocational schools such as Phoenix University are themselves corporate behemoths with branches spread throughout the US like fast-food chains. Indeed, on the neoliberal-consumerist model of education, knowledge is nothing but information to be consumed as quickly as possible, a sugary pabulum as injurious to the health of the mind as Whoppers and Big Macs are to the life of the body. In a society organized around work, productivity, and maximal exploitation of labor, no one has time for a satisfying meal let alone a genuine education, and the “slow food” movement ought to be linked to a drive toward a “slow education” that allows students the time and leisure to think and mature as human beings in pursuit of autonomy rather than in the service of capital.
As corporations, universities were interested in buying materials, investing in research and projects, inventing and patenting new technologies or advances in science and medicine, and competing on the marketplace. In fact, by the 1980s and 1990s, universities and society as a whole were becoming increasingly corporatized, marketized, and globalized. Acting like capitalists committed to the tyranny of the bottom line, universities began the cut-and-slash tactics that Reagan took to social programs in the 1980s, for a profitable enterprise cannot have excess costs, and labor expenses must be minimized. The dynamic that led to the restructuring of universities along corporate lines stemmed from aggressive neoliberal policies. The laissez-faire spirit of early capitalism was revived as neoliberalism, in order to dismantle welfare states, trade barriers, environmental regulations, and anything that stood in the way of trade. Universities moved in consort with the social, political, economic, and military systems that were changing the nature of the world through an aggressive neo-imperialism policy that was part and parcel of neoliberal attempts to subjugate the entire world to corporate power and market logic, while hopefully reviving a moribund American Empire.
Following the dominant corporate model, universities initiated a “de-skilling” of labor, and replaced the skilled labor of faculty with technology.3 Compliant with the needs of businesses and an overworked labor force, and updating higher learning for the age of the Internet, universities began to offer “long-distance learning” such that students could earn a degree at home through correspondence, with “teachers” reduced to functionaries who grade quantitative exams, raising the specter of a future university system that dispenses with teachers altogether in favor of computerized grading machines.4 “Increasingly,” Ollman writes, “university life has been organized on the basis of a complex system of tests, grades, and degrees, so that people know exactly where they fit, what they deserve, what has to be done to rise another notch on the scale, and so on. Discounting—as most educators do—their negative effects on scholarship, critical thinking, and collegiality, these practices have succeeded in instilling a new discipline and respect for hierarchy.”5
As universities implemented the neoliberal model, and economic realities became more pressing, particularly in the global economic crisis of 2008, universities, like automobile industries and other businesses, continued a trend of downsizing that led to replacing tenured and full-time faculty with part-time, adjunct, and contingent instructors viewed contemptuously as an army of cheap surplus labor.6 Increasingly inadequate state funding due to fiscal crises led many to advocate for the privatization of public education institutions, a shift perfectly consistent with the neoliberal trend toward gutting social services and privatizing public institutions. Serving the political-economic-ideological conditions of capitalism in one fell swoop, universities began their attack on the system of tenure in an effort to hire less-expensive, wage- rather than salary-earning part-time instructors with few benefits and even less influence, dropping tenure positions after professors retired, and moving toward renewable three year contract systems, such as those at Florida International University.7 In fact, this is only one of over forty institutions around the country—including Florida Gulf Coast University, Evergreen State College, Bennington, Bradford, Hampshire, and the University of Texas of the Permian Basin—that hire teachers only on annual or multi-year contracts.
Downsizing and de-skilling not only saves universities salary costs and makes them more competitive (an economic benefit), it also creates a highly precarious faculty who, without job security, tend to be docile and afraid to speak out (an ideological benefit). Corporate apologists think that the tenure system is a relic from the industrial era that is outmoded in a postindustrial, neoliberal, post-Fordist, “flexible” labor economy. In this world of hyperflux, people typically have numerous careers; it is unreasonable, neoliberals argue, to expect security, stability, and permanence. By this thinking, academia ought to open itself up to this dynamic market and change its institutional patterns before the market changes it. Faculty, however, reject this argument as market fetishism and fatalism, and insist that while post-Fordism may be fine for the automobile industry, it is anathema for education, which demands the kind of system that can protect free speech, the heart of higher education. There is a direct connection between the quality of research, teaching, education, and the university system as a whole and the strength of academic freedom, tenure, and faculty governance. Academic freedom is a win-win for everyone but repressive corporations, controlling bureaucrats, and right-wing zealots.
Unfortunately, the fast capitalists are winning over academics who seek job security, and the statistics are alarming. For the last seventy years at least, there has been a clear pattern in the academic race to the bottom. As Roger Bowen notes in his mournful eulogy for the tenure institution, “Since 1940, and most particularly over the past 15 years or so, tenured positions have been on the decline, as more colleges have relied on less expensive part-time and non-tenure-track faculty members—even as those same institutions professed fidelity to the principles of academic freedom. The reason for the change is simple and brutal: To enhance their own economic security as institutions, colleges have enhanced the economic insecurity of professors by hiring more and more contingent faculty members—that is, cheap, part-time laborers who enjoy few prerogatives of the profession while suffering low pay, few (if any) benefits, and flimsy contractual rights.”8 By 2003, 43 percent of all faculty were part time teachers and a massive 65 percent of professors held non-tenure positions.9 Thus, “Today two of every three new faculty members hired across the nation are not on the tenure track, up from about 50 percent in the early 1990s.” The economic and ideological benefits are enormous to the capitalist system, and right-wing culture wars play a crucial part in drowning the embers of critical voices before they spread like a bonfire.
Notes
1. David N. Gibbs, “Spying, Secrecy and the University: The CIA is Back on Campus,” April 7, 2003, CounterPunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/gibbs04072003.html.
2. Henry Giroux, The University in Chains (op. cit.). Also see Nicholas Turse, “The Military-Academic Complex,” TomDispatch.com, April 29, 2004, http://www.countercurrents.org/us-turse290404.htm.
3. On the impact of computer technologies and “deskilling” of the labor force, see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).
4. See David F. Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).
5. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/academic_freedom_content.php.
6. On the decline of the tenure system, see Alan Finder, “Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns,” The New York Times, November 20, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/education/20adjunct.html.
7. On the increasing use and abuse of adjunct instructors, see “Breadth of Adjunct Use and Abuse,” Inside Higher Education, December 3, 2008, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/03/adjunct. For statistics on the growth of the contingent workforce, see http://www.aftface.org/storage/face/documents/national_data_sheet.pdf. A critical response is given in Joe Berry’s book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005). For recent alarming statistics, see Audrey Williams June, “Who’s Teaching at American Colleges? Increasingly, Instructors Off the Tenure Track,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2009, http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/05/17970n.htm.
8. Roger Bowen, “A Faustian Bargain for Academic Freedom,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2008, Volume 55, Issue 6, A36, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i06/06a03601.htm.
9. http://www2.nea.org/he/freedom/images/WVCC06cm.ppt#284.26.ContingentFaculty.
Posted on February 15th, 2010 in About AK, AK Allies, AK Authors!
Sad news from our friends at Five Leaves Publications in Nottingham: Colin Ward, the great British anarchist, scholar, and journalist passed away on the evening of February 11.
Ward was always attentive to the ways society already works cooperatively, and pushed us to understand these impulses and experiments as a latent potential for anarchism. Some of what passes for common-sense approaches to schooling, architecture, or social organization are themes Ward touched on in his work and has since been embedded in our popular consciousness. Many of us have been touched by Ward’s work over the years, sometimes without even realizing it.
We wish the best to Colin’s close friends, allies, and especially his partner, Harriet.
Do read Ross Bradshaw’s post about Ward at the Five Leaves Blog if you’re interested in learning more about Ward’s history, or the extended post on Next Left. For our part, we offer below just a small sampling of Colin’s thought, from his classic Anarchy in Action. You can find some of his other books available here.
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Anarchy and a Plausible Future
Originally published in Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1973). Excerpted in Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (Oakland: AK Press, forthcoming December 2010).
For the earlier part of my life I was quieted by being told that ours was the richest country in the world, until I woke up to know that what I meant by riches was learning and beauty, and music and art, coffee and omelettes; perhaps in the coming days of poverty we may get more of these …
–W.R. LETHABY, Form in Civilisation
This book has illustrated the arguments for anarchism, not from theories, but from actual examples of tendencies which already exist, alongside much more powerful and dominant authoritarian methods of social organisation. The important question is, therefore, not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society. Is an anarchist society possible?
We can only say, from the evidence of human history, that no kind of society is impossible. If you are powerful enough and ruthless enough you can impose almost any kind of social organisation on people – for a while. But you can only do so by methods which, however natural and appropriate they may be for any other kind of ‘ism’ – acting on the well-known principle that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, are repugnant to anarchists, unless they see themselves as yet another of those revolutionary elites ‘leading the people’ to the promised land. You can impose authority but you cannot impose freedom. An anarchist society is improbable, not because anarchy is unfeasible, or unfashionable, or unpopular, but because human society is not like that, because, as Malatesta put it in the passage quoted in the last chapter, ‘we are, in any case, only one of the forces acting in society’.
The degree of social cohesion implied in the idea of ‘an anarchist society’ could only occur in a society so embedded in the cake of custom that the idea of choice among alternative patterns of social behaviour simply did not occur to people. I cannot imagine that degree of unanimity and I would dislike it if I could, because the idea of choice is crucial to any philosophy of freedom and spontaneity. So we don’t have to worry about the boredom of utopia: we shan’t get there. But what results from this conclusion? One response would be to stress anarchism as an ideal of personal liberation, ceasing to think of changing society, except by example. Another would be to conclude that because no reads lead to utopia no road leads anywhere, an attitude which, in the end, is identical with the utopian one because it asserts that there are no partial, piecemeal, compromise of temporary solutions, only one attainable or unattainable final solution. But, as Alexander Herzen put it over a century ago: ‘A goal which is infinitely remote is not a goal at all, it is a deception. A goal must be closer – at the very least the labourer’s wage or pleasure in the work performed. Each epoch, each generation, each life has had, and had, its own experience, and the end of each generation must be itself.’
The choice between libertarian and authoritarian solutions is not a once-and-for-all cataclysmic struggle, it is a series of running engagements, most of them never concluded, which occur, and have occurred, throughout history. Every human society, except the most totalitarian of utopias or anti-utopias, is a plural society with large areas which are not in conformity with the officially imposed or declared values. An example of this can be seen in the alleged division of the world into capitalist and communist blocks: there are vast areas of capitalist societies which are not governed by capitalist principles, and there are many aspects of the socialist societies which cannot be described as socialist. You might even say that the only thing that makes life livable in the capitalist world is the unacknowledged capitalist element in it. This is why a controlled market is a left-wing demand in capitalist economy – along with state control, while a free market is a left-wing demand in a communist society – along with workers’ control. In both cases, the demands are for whittling away power from the centre, whether it is the power of the state or capitalism, or state-capitalism.
So what are the prospects for increasing the anarchist content of the real world? From one point of view the outlook is bleak: centralised power, whether that of governments or super-governments, or of private capitalism or the super-capitalism of giant international corporations, has never been greater. The prophesies of nineteenth-century anarchists like Proudhon and Bakunin about the power of the state over the citizen have a relevance today which must have seemed unlikely for their contemporaries.
From another standpoint the outlook is infinitely promising. The very growth of the state and its bureaucracy, the giant corporation and its privileged hierarchy, are exposing their vulnerability to non-co-operation, to sabotage, and to the exploitation of their weaknesses by the weak. They are also giving rise to parallel organisations, counter organisations, alternative organisations, which exemplify the anarchist method. Industrial mergers, and rationalisation have bred the revival of the demand for workers’ control, first as a slogan or a tactic like the work-in, ultimately as a destination. The development of the school and the university as broiler-houses for a place in the occupational pecking-order have given rise to the de-schooling movement and the idea of the anti-university. The use of medicine and psychiatry as agents of conformity has led to the idea of the anti-hospital and the self-help therapeutic group. The failure of Western society to house its citizens has prompted the growth of squatter movements and tenants’ co-operatives. The triumph of the supermarket in the United States has begun a mushrooming of food co-operatives. The deliberate pauperisation of those who cannot work has led to the recovery of self-respect through Claimants’ Unions.
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Posted on February 14th, 2010 in AK Authors!
Learning from Vancouver: Matt Hern, in conversation with Theodore Hamm
In his new book Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future (AK Press, 2010), radical urbanist Matt Hern critiques his home city of Vancouver, paying particular attention to the contradictions in how the city presents itself to the world.
What do you mean by “liquid city”? How do Vancouver and some of the other cities you compare it to–New York, Istanbul, Montreal, et al.–fit that designation?
Part of it is me being metaphorically cute, referring sort of obliquely to the omnipresence in Vancouver of water via the rain, drizzle, fog, ocean, rivers and streams. Mostly I am talking about the pervasively liquid quality of the world in a neo-liberal time of globalization with people, goods, capital, and investment sloshing around the globe virtually unfettered. Globalization has been around forever, and I am most certainly in favour of migration of people and ideas, but this rendition is driven by incredible corporatization. It’s creating a world of faceless, placeless “sites” that are totally replaceable and look more and more alike. I am arguing for everyday people to learn to really inhabit cities, to reverse enclosure, and to create public and even better common places that can be commonly understood, controlled and governed.
You pay particular attention to how cities incorporate their past into the present, and argue that Vancouver needs to “root its future in historical honesty.” Can you explain?
Every city is built on slaughter. But it is especially critical for young, naïve cities like Vancouver to honestly come to grips with who was living here before the city arrived and what that relationship has entailed. In our case, the attempt to erase the Coast Salish people, to relegate them to history has left us in a state of dishonesty, of willful mis-remembering. Stanley Park, right in the heart of the city and the “crown jewel” of the city’s touristic outreach, was once home to four native settlements. Coming to grips with that, and understanding who we stand beside, will help us significantly in building a decent city.
Vancouver will be in the international spotlight for the month of February. How will it showcase itself? What will the world not see?
The world will see a clean, green, manicured, managed and choreographed city in a spectacular setting. What it won’t be offering up is much evidence of a genuine housing crisis, that the Downtown Eastside is a shocking slum in the midst of an exuberantly rich city. We won’t learn that the city has the lowest minimum wage in Canada as well as the highest rates of child poverty in the country. And the global media most definitely won’t be highlighting the really significant resistance during the Games—the 16,000 cops on the street, the $1 billion security budget, and the scores of security and military agencies from all over the world will see to that.
After the Olympics, Vancouver will likely become an even more popular tourist destination and a site for the elite to have second homes, etc. Are you fearful that areas like East Vancouver, which you write so favorably about, will be swallowed up?
I am afraid that the gentrification that is hollowing out the city will continue to gobble what is left of the living, funky and vibrant parts of East Van. But the likelihood is that the city will experience a (possibly severe) economic downturn. Already we’re seeing the negative effects of the ridiculous spending spree the Olympics prompted – amateur and high school sports funding is getting slashed, the BC Arts Council budget has been slashed by a stunning 96%, and libraries, community centres and the parks board have all taken huge hits. And that all happened before the Olympics started. After the circus leaves we are all anticipating much worse. But in many ways I think it will open up a real space to reimagine the city. Amid the rubble the Olympics will leave behind, we have every opportunity to see that a better city is possible. Despite it all, I have a ton of hope, not just for Vancouver, but cities in general.
