Tag: 2017

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Analytic theory Anarchism Anti-racism Books Capitalism Direct democracy Europe Global Indigenous rights Longue durée Middle East Patriarchy Statism - Representationism Strategic theory Values theory White supremacy

Worshiping Power – An Anarchist view of Early State Formation (2017)

Author(s)

Peter Gelderloos

Contents

“The question of how and why states were formed is the keystone of Western civilization’s creation mythology. Most readers will share my experience of having been brought up in a society where history begins with the appearance ofthe State.

Anything outside its domain is a Dark Age, terra incognita, a savage and barbarian land. We are taught that communities created the hierarchical structures of territorial governance that would eventually solidify as states out of a need to organize more efficiently, to respond to natural disasters or population growth, to administer large-scale infrastructure, to defend against hostile outsiders, to protect individual rights through a social contract, or to regulate economic production and surplus value.

All of these hypotheses are demonstrably false, yet we are continually indoctrinated to accept them, to keep us from grasping the predatory, parasitic, elitist, and completely unnecessary nature of the State.

[…] Thanks to social movements and anti-authoritarian struggles in the streets, and a growing recognition—starting with the near nuclear disasters of the Cold War and accelerating with climate change and mass extinction—that the State may well be the death of us all, room has finally been created for the scholarship that backs up what has been obvious for centuries: that the State is the enemy of freedom, human well-being, and the health of the planet.”

Peter Gelderloos

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19th century 20th century 21st century Africa Analytic theory Anti-racism Books Capitalism Feminism Global Heteronormativity Intersectionality LGBTQI+ rights Patriarchy Values theory White supremacy

Black on Both Sides : A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017)

Author(s)

C. Riley Snorton

Contents

“Although the perception that “race” and “gender” are fixed and knowable terms is the dominant logic of identity, in this book ‘trans’ is more about a movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival, and ‘blackness’ signifies upon an enveloping environment and condition of possibility. Here, trans—in each of its permutations—finds expression and continuous circulation within blackness, and blackness is transected by embodied procedures that fall under the sign of gender.

[…] Black on Both Sides is a meditation on an eclectic collection of materials, including mid-nineteenth and twentieth-century medical illustrations, pickup notices, fugitive-slave narratives, Afromodernist literature, twentieth-century journalistic accounts of black people ‘exposed’ as living in/as different genders, true-crime books, documentary film, and poetry. As with any archive or historiographical project, its organization is political.

[…] What is necessary, then, are theoretical and historical trajectories that further imaginative capacities to construct more livable black and trans worlds.”

C. Riley Snorton

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20th century 21st century Analytic theory Books Capitalism Colonialism Direct democracy Feminism Futures theory Intersectionality Longue durée Middle East Patriarchy Social Ecology Socialism Statism - Representationism Strategic theory Values theory

The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan (2017)

Kurdistan, Woman’s Revolution and Democratic Confederalism
Author(s)

Abdullah Öcalan

Contents

“Öcalan coined several slogans, such as ‘A country can’t be free unless the women are free’, and later he restated this more strongly as ‘To me women’s freedom is more precious than the freedom of the homeland’, thereby redefining national liberation as first and foremost women’s freedom. In his prison writings, women’s freedom is taken up constantly as an essential part of his discussions of history, contemporary society and political activism. The practice he observed in real socialist countries and his own theoretical efforts and practice since the1970s led Öcalan to the conclusion that the enslavement of women was the origin of all other forms of enslavement. This, he concludes, is not due to woman being biologically different to man, but because she was the founder and leader of the Neolithic matriarchal system.

[…] Öcalan has examined the issue of women’s freedom, the phenomena of power and state and how interrelated they all are. This has led him over and over again to return to an analysis of history. In doing so he stumbled over nation, state and nation-state and how detrimental these are for any movement; turning even the most revolutionary individuals into mere practitioners of capitalism. For Abdullah Öcalan it is not sufficient to produce critique and self-critique. He feels compelled to lay out what might constitute an alternative to the way of life that is being imposed on society. Therefore, he makes an effort to systematise the lives and struggles of all those oppressed and exploited throughout history, aswell as to propose an alternative model and way of life outside of capitalist modernity and thus classical civilisation.

[…] Öcalan’s voice is tremendously important as one of peace and reason, but it is all too often silenced by his solitary confinement on Imrali Island. His freedom is in the interest of all peoples in the Middle East – not only of the Kurds. As you will see, the writings in this book do not address only the Kurds. There is no ethno-centrist or even nationalist perspective here. Everybody can be inspired by them or benefit from them. The Rojava Revolution may be the initial spark to a wave of transformations in the Middle East and perhaps beyond. And with the support of you, the reader, this wave will also carry Abdullah Öcalan himself out of his prison cell and to freedom.”

International Initiative ‘Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan’ – Peace in Kurdistan

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21st century Analytic theory Books Europe Patriarchy White supremacy

In the Name of Women’s Rights (2017)

THE RISE OF FEMONATIONALISM

Author(s)

Sara R. Farris

Contents

“The success of the far right in the 2014 elections for the European Parliament attracted a great deal of international attention. Across the continent, nationalist right-wing parties either won an unprecedented number of seats or consolidated their significant popular support.

These electoral achievements, coupled with the harshness of the anti-Islam slogans that characterized the parties’ campaigns, triggered fears of a return of fascism. Yet one of the striking features that distinguishes contemporary European nationalist parties from their older counterparts is the invocation of gender equality (and occasionally lgbt rights) within an otherwise xenophobic rhetoric.

Indeed, despite their lack of concern with elaborating concrete policies of gender equality and their masculinist political style, these parties have increasingly advanced their anti-Islam agendas in the name of women’s rights.

From Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, to Marine Le Pen in France and Matteo Salvini in Italy — the key animators of the “brown international” upon which this book focuses — one of the central tropes mobilized by these right-wing nationalists is the profound danger that Muslim males constitute for western European societies, due, above all, to their oppressive treatment of women.”

Introduction

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20th century 21st century Analytic theory Antifascism Books Europe North America Strategic theory White supremacy

Antifa : The Anti-fascist Handbook (2017)

Author(s)

Mark Bray

Contents

“This book takes seriously the transhistorical terror of fascism and the power of conjuring the dead when fighting back. It is an unabashedly partisan call to arms that aims to equip a new generation of anti-fascists with the history and theory necessary to defeat the resurgent Far Right.

Based on sixty-one interviews with current and former anti-fascists from seventeen countries in North America and Europe, it expands our geographical and temporal outlook to contextualize opposition to Trump and the alt-right within a much wider and broader terrain of resistance.

Antifa is the first transnational history of postwar anti-fascism in English and the most comprehensive in any language. It argues that militant anti-fascism is a reasonable, historically informed response to the fascist threat that persisted after 1945 and that has become especially menacing in recent years.”

Introduction

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