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20th century Analytic theory Anarchism Books Capitalism Direct democracy Europe Socialism Statism - Representationism Strategic theory

The Struggle against the State & Other Essays (1996)

Author(s)

Nestor Makhno

Alexandre Skirda (editor)

Contents

“The fact that the modern State is the organizational form of an authority founded upon arbitrariness and vio­lence in the social life of toilers is independent of whether it may be ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’.

It relies upon op­pressive centralism, arising out of the direct violence of a minority deployed against the majority. In order to enforce and impose the legality of its system, the State resorts not only to the gun and money, but also to potent weapons of psychological pressure. With the aide of such weapons, a tiny group of politicians enforces psychological repression of an entire society, and, in particular, of the toiling masses, conditioning them in such a way as to divert their atten­tion from the slavery instituted by the State.

[…] The final and utter liquidation of the State can only come to pass when the struggle of the toilers is oriented along the most libertarian lines possible, when the toilers will themselves determine the structures of their social ac­tion. These structures should assume the form of organs of social and economic self-direction, the form of free ‘anti­authoritarian’ soviets.

The revolutionary workers and their vanguard – the anarchists – must analyze the nature and structure of these soviets and specify their revolutionary functions in advance. It is upon that, chiefly, that the posi­tive evolution and development of anarchist ideas in the ranks of those who will accomplish the liquidation of the State on their own account in order to build a free society, will be dependent.”

Nestor Makhno

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The Ecology of Freedom (1982)

Author(s)

Murray Bookchin

Contents

“A hierarchical mentality fosters the renunciation of the pleasures of life. It justifies toil, guilt, and sacrifice by the ‘inferiors’, and pleasure and the indulgent gratification of virtually every caprice by their ‘supe­riors’.

[…] This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day – not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception. Unless we explore this history, which lives actively within us like earlier phases of our individual lives, we will never be free of its hold.

We may eliminate social injustice, but we will not achieve social freedom. We may elimi­nate classes and exploitation, but we will not be spared from the tram­mels of hierarchy and domination. We may exorcize the spirit of gain and accumulation from our psyches, but we will still be burdened by gnawing guilt, renunciation, and a subtle belief in the ‘vices’ of sensu­ousness.”

Murray Bookchin

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Democratic Confederalism (2011)

Author(s)

Abdullah Öcalan

Contents

“In contrast to a centralist and bureaucratic understanding of administration and exercise of power, confederalism poses a type of political self-administration where all groups of the society and all cultural identities can express themselves in local meetings, general conventions and councils. This understanding of democracy opens the political space to all strata of the society and allows for the formation of different and diverse political groups. In this way it also advances the political integration of the society as a whole.

Politics becomes a part of everyday life.

Without politics the crisis of the state cannot be solved since the crisis is fuelled by a lack of representation of the political society. Terms like federalism or self administration as they can be found in liberal democracies need to be conceived anew.
Essentially, they should not be conceived as hierarchical levels of the administration of the nation-state but rather as central tools of social expression and participation. This, in turn, will advance the politicization of the society. We do not need big theories here, what we need is the will to lend expression to the social needs by strengthening the autonomy of the social actors structurally and by creating the conditions for the organization of the society as a whole.

The creation of an operational level where all kinds of social and political groups, religious communities, or intellectual tendencies can express themselves directly in all local decision-making processes can also be called participative democracy. The stronger the participation the more powerful is this kind of democracy.

While the nation-state is in contrast to democracy, and even denies it, democratic confederalism constitutes a continuous democratic process.”

Abdullah Öcalan

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Our Word is Our Weapon : Selected Writings by Subcomandante Marcos (2001)

Author(s)

Subcomandante Marcos

Juana Ponce de Leon (editor)

Contents

“The indigenous of Chiapas aren’t the only humiliated and offended people in this world. In all places and at all times, regardless of race, color, customs, culture, and religious belief, the human creature we are so proud to be has always known how to humiliate and offend those whom, with sad irony, he continues to call his fellows. We have invented things that don’t exist in nature : cruelty, torture, and disdain.

By a perverse use of race, we’ve come to divide humanity into irreducible categories : rich and poor, master and slave, powerful and weak, wise and ignorant. And incessantly in each of these divisions we’ve made subdivisions so as to vary and freely multiply reasons for disdain, humiliation, and offense.

In recent years Chiapas has been the place where the most disdained, most humiliated, and most offended people of Mexico were able to recover intact a dignity and an honor that had never been completely lost, a place where the heavy tombstone of an oppression that has gone on for centuries has been shattered to allow the passage of a procession of new and different living people ahead of an endless procession of murders. These men, women, and children of the present are only demanding respect for their rights, not just as human beings and as part of this humanity but also as the indigenous who want to continue being indigenous.

They’ve risen up most especially with a moral strength that only honor and dignity themselves are capable of bringing to birth and nursing in the spirit, even while the body suffers from hunger and the usual miseries.”

José Saramago (Prologue)

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Carceral Capitalism (2018)

Author(s)

Jackie Wang

Contents

“The essays included in this book […] attempt to update the analytic of racial capitalism for a contemporary context. Rather than focusing on the axis of production by analyzing how racism operates via wage differentials, this work attempts to identify and analyze what I consider the two main modalities of contemporary racial capitalism : predatory lending and parasitic governance.

These racialized economic practices and modes of governance are linked insofar as they both emerge to temporarily stave off crises generated by finance capital. By titling this book Carceral Capitalism, I hope to draw attention to the ways in which the carceral techniques of the state are shaped by—and work in tandem with—the imperatives of global capitalism. […] All this is to say that anti black racism is at the core of mass incarceration and the transformation of the welfare state not only into the (neoliberal) debt state, but into the penal state as well.

At the dawn of the carceral era, the United States chose the path of divestment in social entitlements and investment in prisons and police. […] The conversion of poverty into a personal moral failure was intimately tied to the construction of black Americans as disposable and subject to mass incarceration. Anti black racism, and not merely the profit motive, is at the heart of mass incarceration.

Thus, the title of this book, Carceral Capitalism, is not an attempt to posit carcerality as an effect of capitalism, but to think about the carceral continuum alongside and in conjunction with the dynamics of late capitalism.”

Jackie Wang

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Anarchism and Art : Democracy in the Cracks and on the Margins (2016)

Author(s)

Mark Mattern

Contents

“The prefigurative potential of art lies in the arts as a domain of creativity and imagination, where artists constantly innovate new cultural forms. Each new artistic or cultural form represents new potentialities for human thought and action. Of course, artists also often simply reflect changes that are occurring in other domains. Artists constantly strive to put their feelings and ideas onto canvas and onto stage and into words, feelings and ideas that often lie outside the margins of current ways of life.

In their work we can see alternative futures.

Since the inception of the anarchist movement in the nineteenth century, ‘the arts have been an integral part of the anarchist movement’. […] It reflects back on us ; it reveals ourselves to ourselves and to others. This opens the possibility of self and social criticism. […] Many anarchists, past and present, have emphasized art’s role in adding beauty and joy to any life worth living, as well as its role in challenging superstition and social conventions.

Contemporary anarchist David Graeber asks, ‘Why is it that artists have so often been drawn to revolutionary politics?’ The answer, he argues, ‘must have something to do with alienation.’ Artists imagine things and then bring them into being ; and this is the essence of unalienated production. The link to imagining and then creating revolutionary alternatives is a natural one. And this is especially true ‘if that alternative is the possibility of a society premised on less alienated forms of creativity.’

Graeber highlights an important point about anarchists past and present : they do not accept the often dreary, mechanical, regimented, work – and efficiency- obsessed world defined by capitalism and the liberal democratic state. It does not have to be this way, they affirm.

We can create a better world, a world less marked by the mind-numbing, alienating forms of work and leisure conceived primarily in terms of consumption. We can create a world marked instead by creative, joyful, satisfying work and play. We can bridge the gap between art and everyday life.”

Mark Mattern

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African Anarchism : The History of a Movement (1997)

Author(s)

Sam Mbah

I. E. Igariwey

Contents

“This work highlights the opportunities that exist for anarchism, analyzing the concrete challenges that lie ahead.

Chapters one and two deal with the history, growth and development of anarchism, from the fierce struggle between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin and their followers within the First International to the Spanish Revolution.

Chapter three unravels the origins of anarchism on the African continent, identifying certain “anarchic elements” in African communalism and analyzing the social organization of stateless societies in Africa. It traces incorporation of African economies into the world capitalist system and poses the question, ”Is there an african anarchism?”

Chapter four examines the development of socialism in Africa. Chapter five deals with the failure of socialism and its implications for anarchism in Africa. Chapter six analyzes in detail current drawbacks to the realization of anarchist ideals in Africa. And chapter seven details the way in which anarchism represents the best, and indeed the only, way forward for Africa.”

Sam Mbah & I. E. Igariwey

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

Author(s)

Paulo Freire

Contents

“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.

The pedagogy of the oppressed, the introductory outlines of which are presented in the following pages, is a task for radicals; it cannot be carried out by sectarians. […]
From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.”

Paulo Freire

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Free Women of Spain (1991)

Author(s)

Martha Ackelsberg

Contents

“In 1936, groups of women in Madrid and Barcelona founded Mujeres Libres, an organization dedicated to the liberation of women from their ‘triple enslavement to ignorance, as women, and as producers’. Although it lasted for less than three years (its activities in Spain were brought to an abrupt halt by the victory of Franco’s forces in February 1939), Mujeres Libres mobilized over 20,000 women and developed an extensive network of activities designed to empower individual women while building a sense of community.

Like the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement in which these women were rooted, Mujeres Libres insisted that the full develop­ment of women’s individuality was dependent upon the development of a strong sense of connection with others.

In this respect, as in a number of others, Mujeres Libres represents an alternative to the individualistic per­spectives characterizing mainstream feminist movements of that time and of our own.”

Martha Ackelsberg

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Queering Anarchism : Addressing and undressing power and desire (2012)

Author(s)

Abbey Volcano (editor)

C. B. Daring (editor)

Martha Ackelsberg (editor)

Jen Rogue (editor)

Deric Shannon (editor)

Contents

“We think queer politics and anarchism have a lot to offer each other and we’re excited by some of the connections being drawn between the two by people in their writing, organizing, struggling, and daily lives.

So we want to suggest that an introduction to the overlaps between anarchist and queer politics could be useful at this juncture. […] We think the strong connections between anarchist and queer politics are striking. But, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

We hope this collection serves as a smorgasbord of sorts, providing insights into how we might alter the landscape of this often miserable, violent, and boring world and bring into being different ones.

We think the case here is supported quite well that there are many more fruitful engagements to emerge from this meeting of queer and anarchism—and a variety of other partnerships along the way.”

Editors

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