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 It details a vast array of unpublished documents, letters, debates, manifestos, reports, impassioned calls-to-arms and reasoned analysis; the history, organization and practice of the movement—its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.

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.

 

 

Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organisation from Proudhon to May 1968 - Alexandre Skirda & Paul Sharkey

Drawing on decades of research, Skirda traces anarchism as a major political movement and ideology across the 19th and 20th centuries. Critical and engaging, he offers biting and incisive portraits of the major thinkers, and more crucially, the organizations they inspired, influenced, came out of, and were spurned by.

Bakuninist secret societies; the Internationals and the clash with Marx; the Illegalists, bombers and assassins; the mass trade unions; and of course, the Russian and Spanish Revolutions are all discussed through the prism of working people battling fiercely for a new world free of the shackles of Capital and the State.

Alexandre Skirda is the foremost anarchist theorist and activist writing in Europe today.

Spinoza Now - Dimitris Vardoulakis (Ed.)

 

Spinoza Now, the first broadly interdisciplinary volume dealing with Spinozan thought, asserts the importance of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates. In this bold endeavor, the essays gathered here extend the Spinozan project beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy to encompass all forms of life-affirming activity, including the arts and literature. 

Those interested in the interdisciplinary significance and application of Spinoza’s philosophy may find this volume provocative.

— Choice

Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism - Jean-Paul Sartre

Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It includes Sartre's celebrated preface to Fanon's classic Wretched of the Earth. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism had a profound impact on French intellectual life, inspiring many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

Marx. A very short introduction - Peter Singer

 

Peter Singer identifies the central vision that unifies Marx's thought, enabling us to grasp Marx's views as a whole. He sees him as a philosopher primarily concerned with human freedom, rather than as an economist or a social scientist. In plain English, he explains alienation, historical materialism, the economic theory of Capital, and Marx's ideas of communism, and concludes with an assessment of Marx's legacy.

Squatting in Europe - Squatting Europe Kollective

Squatting offers a radical but simple solution to the crises of housing, homelessness, and the lack of social space that mark contemporary society: occupying empty buildings and rebuilding lives and communities in the process. Squatting has a long and complex history, interwoven with the changing and contested nature of urban politics over the last forty years.

Squatting can be an individual strategy for shelter or a collective experiment in communal living. Squatted and self-managed social centres have contributed to the renewal of urban struggles across Europe and intersect with larger political projects. However, not all squatters share the same goals, resources, backgrounds or desire for visibility.

Squatting in Europe aims to move beyond the conventional understandings of squatting, investigating its history in Europe over the past four decades. Historical comparisons and analysis blend together in these inquiries into squatting in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and England. In it members of SqEK (Squatting Europe Kollective) explore the diverse, radical, and often controversial nature of squatting as a form of militant research and self-managed knowledge production.

Essays by Miguel Martínez, Gianni Piazza, Hans Pruijt, Pierpaolo Mudu, Claudio Cattaneo, Andre Holm, Armin Kuhn, Linus Owens, Florence Bouillon, Thomas Aguilera, and ETC Dee.

“Amidst the proliferation of post-political banter, it is refreshing to see the time-tested politics of pre-figurative direct action being taking so seriously.  This is a must-read for anybody who wants to better understand how the politics of squatting offer a set of transformative strategies for a creating a more egalitarian world.  Furthermore, this collection illustrates how such transformative politics so often start in the world’s cities through deliberate organizing and thoughtful reflection by committed groups of activists, scholars and everyday citizens.” – Nik Heynen, University of Georgia

“In an era of austerity, capitalist accumulation by dispossession, and the criminalization of protest this excellent book serves as an inspiring and timely reminder of people’s re-appropriation of urban spaces in order to fashion alternatives to the status quo. Structured around a typology of squatting configurations – as anti-deprivation; entrepreneurial; conservational; political; and alternative housing strategies – this empirically-rich collection of essays by scholars and activists provides persuasive evidence of the creativity and politically transformative potential involved in such practices.” – Paul Routledge, University of Glasgow

The Debt Resistors' Operations Manual - Strike Debt / Occupy Wall Street

"This manual shows us the ways in which we are all made to pay for basic social survival—for the rest of our lives. This is the traditional idea of a “debtor”—a person who borrowed money and owes a sum of money to a bank or government agency. This is fairly straightforward and most people are beginning to understand this: mafia capitalism means that governments make cuts and the people have to go into debt to survive. The burden of sustaining “life” gets shifted from the state to the individual and household. Most households are drowning in various forms of debt; it is a way of controlling us—making us weak, afraid and financially unstable.

Our whole system runs on debt and credit—our households, our cities, our countries and all those who slip between the cracks. From municipal bonds that we never agreed to, to the low-income or unemployed worker forced to take payday loans after being excluded from “mainstream” credit, the whole word has become indebted. This is how the 1% maintains its wealth and power.

Anyone fighting the 1% is a debt resistor. We are all debtors now."

After Bourdieu: Influence, Critique - David L. Swartz & Vera L. Zolberg (Edited by)

 

The most significant French sociologist since Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu's influence on intellectual life shows no sign of abating. He was a prolific and consequential scholar whose impact can be measured by the Social Science Citation Index and international surveys of academics. Conceptualizations, such as habitus and field, his heuristic treatment of cultural, economic, political, social and symbolic capital to analyze the uses of power, and his insistence upon melding the usually separated micro and macro levels of societal theorizing are now embedded in the basic vocabulary of sociology and anthropology. Whether or not in accord with his outlook, serious scholars are obliged to test themselves against his challenges. Bourdieu also played a considerable role as a public intellectual, taking positions on questions vital to France and to the world more generally. Many of his contributions stem from his important research projects: colonialism, educational inequality, the social foundations of taste in the arts and life styles, social reproduction of status relationships, and more recently, the impact of unchecked globalism on the disadvantaged. The articles in this book represent a sampling of the most recent and durable of the ongoing conversations, debates, and research orientations that Bourdieu launched.