No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism - Daniel Guerin & Paul Sharkey

 

The first English translation of Guerin’s monumental anthology of anarchism, published here in one volume. It details a vast array of unpublished documents, letters, debates, manifestos, reports, impassioned calls-to-arms and reasoned analysis; the history, organization and practice of the movement—its theorists, advocates and activists; the great names and the obscure, towering legends and unsung heroes.This definitive anthology portrays anarchism as a sophisticated ideology whose nuances and complexities highlight the natural desire for freedom in all of us. The classical texts will re-establish anarchism as both an intellectual and practical force to be reckoned with. Includes writings by Emma Goldman, Kropotkin, Berkman, Bakunin, Proudhon, and Malatesta.Daniel Guerin was the author of Anarchism: From Theory to Practice.

Exquisite Rebel - Voltairine de Cleyre

Emma Goldman called Voltairine de Cleyre "the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced." Yet her writings and speeches on anarchism and feminism-as radical, passionate, and popular at the time as Goldman's-are virtually unknown today. This important book brings de Cleyre's eloquent and incisive work out of undeserved obscurity. Twenty-one essays are reprinted here, including her classic works: "Anarchism and the American Tradition," "The Dominant Idea," and "Sex Slavery." Three biographical essays are also included: two new ones by Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell, and a rarely reprinted one from Emma Goldman. At a time when the mainstream women's movement asked only for the right to vote and rarely challenged the status quo, de Cleyre demanded an end to sex roles, called for economic independence for women, autonomy within and without marriage, and offered a radical critique of the role of the Church and State in oppressing women. In today's world of anti-globalization actions, de Cleyre's anarchist ideals of local self-rule, individual conscience, and decentralization of power still remain fresh and relevant.

Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl - Tiqqun

The Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality.--from Theory of the Young-Girl

First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society's total product and model citizen: whatever "type" of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women's magazines, rooted in Proust's figure of Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski's notion of "living currency" and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses -- and makes visible -- a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.

In the years since the book's first publication in French, the worlds of fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating disorders have moved beyond the comparatively tame domain of paper magazines into the perpetual accessibility of Internet culture. Here the Young-Girl can seek her own reflection in corporate universals and social media exchanges of "personalities" within the impersonal realm of the marketplace. Tracing consumer society's colonization of youth and sexuality through the Young-Girl's "freedom" (in magazine terms) to do whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously competitive and psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.

The Administration of Fear - Paul Virilio, Ames Hodges and Bertrand Richard

 

We are living under the administration of fear: fear has become an environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines, and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe.

The administration of fear also means that states are tempted to create policies for the orchestration and management of fear. Globalization has progressively eaten away at the traditional prerogatives of states (most notably of the welfare state), and states have to convince citizens that they can ensure their physical safety.

In this new and lengthy interview, Paul Virilio shows us how the "propaganda of progress," the illuminism of new technologies, provide unexpected vectors for fear in the way that they manufacture frenzy and stupor. For Virilio, the economic catastrophe of 2007 was not the death knell of capitalism, as some have claimed, but just further evidence that capitalism has accelerated into turbo-capitalism, and is accelerating still. With every natural disaster, health scare, and malicious rumor now comes the inevitable "information bomb"--live feeds take over real space, and technology connects life to the immediacy of terror, the ultimate expression of speed. With the nuclear dissuasion of the Cold War behind us, we are faced with a new form of civil dissuasion: a state of fear that allows for the suspension of controversial social situations.

The Communist Horizon - Jodi Dean

In this new title in Verso’s Pocket Communism series, Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of the Soviet Union. In an age when the malfeasance of international banking has alerted exploited populations the world over to the unsustainability of an economic system predicated on perpetual growth, it is time the left ended its melancholic accommodation with capitalism.

In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, our very ability to communicate is exploited, but revolution is still possible if we organize on the basis of our common and collective desires. Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Dean argues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution and it needs to constitute itself as a party.

An innovative work of pressing relevance, The Communist Horizon offers nothing less than a manifesto for a new collective politics.

The Anarchis Revolution. Polemical Articles 1924-1931 - Errico Malatesta

"The revolution is the creation of new living institutions, new groupings, new social relationships; it is the destruction of privileges and monopolies; it is the new spirit of justice, of brotherhood, of freedom which must renew the whole of social life, raise the moral level and the material conditions of the masses by calling on them to provide, through their direct and conscientious action, for their own futures. Revolution is the organization of all public services by those who work in them in their own interest as well as the public’s; Revolution is the destruction of all coercive ties; it is the autonomy of groups, of communes, of regions; Revolution is the free federation brought about by desire for brotherhood, by individual and collective interests, by the needs of production and defense; Revolution is the constitution of innumerable free groupings based on ideas, wishes, and tastes of all kinds that exist among the people; Revolution is the forming and disbanding of thousands of representative, district, communal, regional, national bodies which, without having any legislative power, serve to make known and to coordinate the desires and interests of people near and far and which act through information, advice and example. Revolution is freedom proved in the crucible of facts—and lasts so long as freedom lasts, that is until others, taking advantage of the weariness that overtakes the masses, of the inevitable disappointments that follow exaggerated hopes, of the probable errors and human faults, succeed in constituting a power, which supported by an army of conscripts or mercenaries, lays down the law, arrests the movement at the point it has reached, and then begins the reaction". 

Alchemists of Human Nature: Psychological Utopianism in Gross, Jung, Reich and Fromm - Petteri Pietikainen

This is the first book-length study of Modernist utopias of the mind. Pietikainen examines the psychodynamic writings of Otto Gross, C G Jung, Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. After they broke from Freud and orthodox psychoanalysis, Pietikainen argues, utopianism became increasingly important to the fundamental ambitions of all four thinkers. He shows how Gross' "Matriarchal Communism", Jung's "Archetypal Cosmos", Reich's "Orgonomic Functionalism" and Fromm's "Socialist Humanism" were attempts to reshape social structures and human relations by conquering the Unconscious. Pietikainen places the 'utopian impulse' with the historical context of the large, violent socio-political narratives of the early twentieth century. This innovative interdisciplinary book contributes to ongoing scholarly and professional discussions about the historicity versus the universality of human nature.

Digital Labour and Karl Marx - Christian Fuchs

How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and "social media" such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry.

Relying on a range of global case studies--from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo--Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.

Occupy! A Short History of Workers' Occupations - Dave Sherry

Workplace occupations have reappeared over the last year in response to the economic crisis. Groups of workers have refused to let their factories and jobs go without a fight. Today's movement can learn from a century of experience. Dave Sherry looks at waves of occupations and sit-ins from Italy 1920, France 1936 and 1968, to the US car workers in Flint and Britain's own tradition from the Upper Clyde shipbuilders to the women at Lee Jeans. This short accessible history is rich with first-hand accounts as well as political analysis.

 

 

The Angry Brigade: A History of Britain's First Urban Guerilla Group - Gordon Carr

 

Based on extensive research, this book remains the essential study of the Angry Brigade, a group of urban guerillas, who, between 1970 and 1972, used guns and bombs on embassies of repressive regimes, police stations and army barracks, boutiques and factories, government departments, and the homes of cabinet ministers as well the attorney general and the commissioner of the metropolitan police. An avalanche of police raids followed, culminating in the "Stoke Newington 8" conspiracy trial—the longest criminal trial in British legal history—which is throughly discussed in this volume. Updated with a comprehensive chronology of the "Angry Decade" and new illustrations, this new edition also adds introductions by Stuart Christie and John Barker, two of the defendants, who discuss the political and social context of the movement and its long-term significance.