Zoe Baker on Historical Anarchist Tensions, Practice, and Action
From It's Going Down
Original title: “Means and Ends”: Zoe Baker on Historical Anarchist Tensions, Practice, and Action
From It's Going Down
Original title: “Means and Ends”: Zoe Baker on Historical Anarchist Tensions, Practice, and Action
From Red & Black Notes
Juan Verala Luz reviews Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay 1956-1976. This review began as opening remarks at a recent book launch for Anarchist Popular Power. You can read excerpts from the original statement in this report, and listen to it alongside a discussion with historian Troy Araiza Kokinis in a forthcoming It’s Going Down podcast episode.
From Black Rose Anarchist Federation
On July 18th, around 40 people crammed into the upstairs floor of the Tamarack bar, social center, and library in Oakland, California for the launch of Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay 1956-76. With so little space in the upper story of the building, some attendees stood in the stairwell to listen to the presentation on the history and activity of the Anarchist Federation of Uruguay (FAU) made by author and historian Troy Andreas Araiza Kokkinis. For over an hour Araiza Kokkinis covered in harrowing detail the activity of the FAU in the years preceding and during the civic-military dictatorship in Uruguay.
From It's Going Down
A Review of Peter Staudenmaier, “Ecology Contested: Environmental Politics Between Left and Right”
Antifascist researcher Spencer Sunshine offers a critical look at ecofascism and Peter Staudenmaier’s book, Ecology Contested.
From Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
In this special reverse episode, Miriam talks with Margaret about Sholem Schwarzbard, the radical Jewish assassin.
From Nerd Teacher
Much in the way that I’m immensely disappointed in the media made “by teachers, for teachers,” I am finding that I am equally disenchanted with ‘anarchist’ media. This really shouldn’t be the case, but it is.
From Outside the Circle
Review in the Jewish Socialist (Spring 2022) by Gabriel Moshenska (@GabeMoshenska) of There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists, edited by Cindy Milstein (AK Press, 2021)
From Full Stop by Shane Burley
Speculative Fiction can be a place where we dream about what is possible, or even what we think is not. Because it is about future worlds or alternative trajectories, it opens up our imagination to a fundamental change in our society. For better or for worse, it is a temporal projection where we can take seriously (or precisely un-seriously) what giant social shifts can result in. This may be part of why we are living through a massive surge of radical Speculative/Science Fiction, which adds a revolutionary dimension to this world building. It alternates between two perspectives, the dystopian, where we see through the conclusions of the human self-destruction we are witnessing, or its alternative, the utopian. The utopian Speculative Fiction is the much harder of the two, willing to take risks by imagining something provocatively different, better, than what we have now.
from Anarchist Agency
an Interview with Eric Laursen
Agency: Your recently published book The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State. Why the State? What inspired you to tackle such a monumental subject at this time? Eric Laursen: Mainly the fact that it hasn’t really been done before. I’ve identified as an anarchist for just about my entire adult life, and early on, I was struck by the fact that the so-called “classic” anarchists – Kropotkin, Bakunin, Goldman, etc – never analyzed in an extended way what the State was.
From Anarchist Agency
A New Animated Video Primer From Agency & AK Press
From ILL WILL
A Conversation with Marquis Bey
In the summer of 2020, Marquis Bey published Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism with AK Press. Released hot off the heels of a nationwide uprising against white supremacy and the police, the book stages an encounter between blackness and anarchism that offers insight into the spirit of that rebellion and others to come. The occasion spurred the following conversation, beginning in 2020 and wrapping up in the final months of 2021. In it, we discuss fragmentation, unsettled notions of blackness, being held accountable, and more. Marquis Bey’s next book, Black Trans Feminism, is due out January 2022.
via It's Going Down
State of War, an Excerpt from “The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism & Abolition” by William C. Anderson
Saying “stop killing us” and asking an oppressor not to oppress is not going to work. Taking the life of the system we’re up against through abolition is much more complex than simply fighting people in the streets
From Anarchist Writers by anarcho
This is my introduction to Modern Science and Anarchy by Peter Kropotkin (AK Press, 2018). This was the last book published by Kropotkin during his lifetime (La Science Moderne et L’Anarchie, 1913) and he explores themes he had been raising since his first joined the anarchist movement in the 1870s. It shows that he did not become a reformist, as some claim, but remained a revolutionary anarchist communist to his death. The book is available, so please consider buying it for AK Press.
A review by rowan from Perspectives on Anarchist Theory‘s “Beyond the Crisis” issue, available at AK Press: https://www.akpress.org/perspectivesonanarchisttheorymagazine.html
From Anarchist Writers by anarcho
There is nothing worse than seeing a film labelled “inspired by true events” (or a TV series “inspired” by the stories of Philip K. Dick) for you know that any relation to actual events is purely accidental. This does not mean the film will be bad – indeed, it may be excellent (Blade Runner springs to mind as regards Dick adaptations). It just means that when you discover the source of the “inspiration” you realise the film does not reflect it very much, if at all.