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18th century 19th century Analytic theory Anarchism Books Capitalism Europe Socialism Statism - Representationism Strategic theory Values theory

The Method of Freedom : An Errico Malatesta Reader (2014)

Author(s)

Errico Malatesta

Davide Turcato (editor)

Contents

“In his writing, Malatesta has the rare ability of being both deep and clear. This is best illustrated by an example. In the Anarchy pamphlet, which we reprint in this volume, Malatesta defines anarchy in a single sentence :

“Anarchy, in common with socialism, has as its basis, its point of departure, its essential environment, equality of conditions; its beacon is solidarity and freedom is its method.”

In its reference to the standard values of the French Revolution, égalité, fraternité, and liberté, the definition may seem a cliché. Yet, behind its deceptive simplicity, it expresses a whole, original conception of anarchism, which rests on the role assigned to each of those standard values. Equality of conditions means common ownership of the means of production, for there cannot be equality of conditions when a class monopolizes the means of production. Thus, a socialist society is being described here. Yet socialism is not an end-point; it is just a point of departure of an open-ended process. The beacon of that process is solidarity.

By assigning the driver’s seat of social evolution to an intentionally pursued value Malatesta is expressing a voluntarist view, in contrast to the marxist emphasis on the development of productive forces. And by assigning that seat to solidarity he is rejecting individualism. Finally, by advocating freedom as a method Malatesta is re-asserting free initiative in contrast to authoritarian socialism.

Malatesta is offering no blueprint of the future society, yet his definition is strongly characterized in terms of the process: he is describing an experimentalist, pluralist, socialist open society.”

Davide Turcato

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20th century Analytic theory Anarchism Books Direct democracy Europe Futures theory North America Social Ecology Socialism Strategic theory

Post-scarcity Anarchism (1971)

Author(s)

Murray Bookchin

Contents

“Today the greatest strength of capitalism lies in its ability to subvert revolutionary goals by the ideology of domination. What accounts for this strength is the fact that ‘bourgeois ideology’ is not merely bourgeois.

Capitalism is the heir of history, the legatee of all the repressive features of earlier hierarchical societies, and bourgeois ideology has been pieced together from the oldest elements of social domination and conditioning—elements so very old, so intractable, and so seemingly unquestionable, that we often mistake them for ‘human nature’.

There is no more telling commentary on the power of this cultural legacy than the extent to which the socialist project itself is permeated by hierarchy, sexism and renunciation. From these elements come all the social enzymes that catalyze the everyday relationships of the bourgeois world—and of the so-called ‘radical movement’.

Hierarchy, sexism and renunciation do not disappear with ‘democratic centralism’, a ‘revolutionary leadership’, a ‘workers’ state’, and a ‘planned economy’. On the contrary, hierarchy, sexism, and renunciation function all the more effectively if centralism appears to be ‘democratic’, if leaders appear to be ‘revolutionaries’, if the state appears to belong to the ‘workers’, and if commodity production appears to be ‘planned’.

Insofar as the socialist project fails to note the very existence of these elements, much less their vicious role, the ‘revolution’ itself becomes a facade for counterrevolution.”

Murray Bookchin

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20th century Analytic theory Antifascism Books Europe Social Ecology White supremacy

Ecofascism : Lessons from the German Experience (1996)

Author(s)

Janet Biehl

Peter Staudenmaier

Contents

“What prevents ecological politics from yielding reaction or fascism with an ecological patina is an ecology movement that maintains a broad social emphasis, one that places the ecological crisis in a social context.

As social ecologists, we see the roots of the present ecological crisis in an irrational society — not in the biological makeup of human beings, nor in a particular religion, nor in reason, science, or technology. On the contrary, we uphold the importance of reason, science, and technology in creating both a progressive ecological movement and an ecological society. It is a specific set of social relations — above all, the competitive market economy — that is presently destroying the biosphere. Mysticism and biologism, at the very least, deflect public attention away from such social causes.

In presenting these essays, we are trying to preserve the all-important progressive and emancipatory implications of ecological politics. More than ever, an ecological commitment requires people today to avoid repeating the errors of the past, lest the ecology movement become absorbed in the mystical and antihumanistic trends that abound today.”

Janet Biehl & Peter Staudenmaier

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Analytic theory Books Capitalism Global Longue durée Social Ecology Statism - Representationism

Capital as Power : A Study of Order and Creorder (2009)

Author(s)

Shimshon Bichler

Jonathan Nitzan

Contents

“Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist.
Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital.

This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society.”

Jonathan Nitzan & Shimshon Bichler

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Analytic theory Anthropocentrism Books Global Longue durée Social Ecology

The Shock of the Anthropocene (2013)

Author(s)

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Christophe Bonneuil

Contents

“What exactly has been happening on Earth in the last quarter of a millennium? The Anthropocene. Anthropo-what? We already live in the Anthropocene, so let us get used to this ugly word and the reality that it names. It is our epoch and our condition.

This geological epoch is the product of the last few hundred years of our history. The Anthropocene is the sign of our power, but also of our impotence. It is an Earth whose atmosphere has been damaged by the 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide we have spilled by burning coal and other fossil fuels. It is the impoverishment and artificializing of Earth’s living tissue, permeated by a host of new synthetic chemical molecules that will even affect our descendants. It is a warmer world with a higher risk of catastrophes, a reduced ice cover, higher sea-levels and a climate out of control.

The Anthropocene label, proposed in the 2000s by specialists in Earth system sciences, is an essential tool for understanding what is happening to us. This is not just an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. The present book sets out to comprehend this new epoch through the narratives that can be made of it. It calls for new environmental humanities to rethink our visions of the world and our ways of inhabiting the Earth together.

Scientists have built up data and models that already situate us beyond the point of no return to the Holocene, on the timetable of geological epochs. They have produced figures and curves that depict humanity as a major geological force. But what narratives can make sense of these dramatic curves ?”

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Analytic theory Anarchism Books Capitalism Global Longue durée Social Ecology Strategic theory

A Radical Green Political Theory (1999)

Author(s)

Alan Carter

Contents

“This volume is the first systematic, comprehensive and cogent environmental political philosophy. It exposes the relationships between the ever-worsening environmental crises, the nature of prevailing economic structures and the role of the modern state and concludes that the combination of these factors is driving humanity towards destruction.
Innovative, provocative and cutting-edge, A Radical Green Political Theory will be of enormous value to all those with an interest in the environment, political theory and moral and political philosophy.”

Figures

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19th century 20th century Analytic theory Antifascism Books Capitalism Europe White supremacy

Fascism and Big Business (1936)

Author(s)

Daniel Guerin

Contents

“When the economic crisis becomes acute, when the rate of profit sinks toward zero, the bourgeoisie can see only one way to restore its profits: it empties the pockets of the people down to the last centime. It resorts to what M. Caillaux, once finance minister of France, expressively calls ‘the great penance’: brutal slashing of wages and social expenditures, raising of tariff duties at the expense of the consumer, etc. The state, furthermore, rescues business enterprises on the brink of bankruptcy, forcing the masses to foot the bill. Such enterprises are kept alive with subsidies, tax exemptions, orders for public works and armaments.

In short, the state thrusts itself into the breach left by the vanishing private customers. But such maneuvers are difficult under a democratic regime. As long as democracy survives, the masses, though thoroughly deceived and plundered, have some means of defense against the ‘great penance’: freedom of the press, universal suffrage, the right to organize into unions and to strike, etc. Feeble defenses, it is true, but still capable of setting some limit to the insatiable demands of the money power.

In particular, the resistance of the organized working class makes it rather difficult to simply lower wages. And so, in certain countries and under certain conditions, the bourgeoisie throws its traditional democracy overboard and conjures up with its invocations – and its subsidies – that ‘strong state’ which alone can strip the masses of all means of defense, tying their hands behind their backs, the better to empty their pockets.”

Daniel Guerin

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Analytic theory Anarchism Asia Books Direct democracy Global Longue durée Statism - Representationism

Society against the State (1974)

Author(s)

Pierre Clastres

Contents

“Primitive societies are societies without a State. This factual judgment, accurate in itself, actually hides an opinion, a value judgment that immediately throws doubt on the possibility of constituting political anthropology as a strict science. What the statement says, in fact, is that primitive societies are missing something – the State – that is essential to them, as it is to any other society: our own, for instance. Consequently, those socie­ties are incomplete ; they are not quite true societies –
they are not civilized – their existence continues to suffer the painful experi­ence of a lack – the lack of a State – which, try as they may, they will never make up. Whether clearly stated or not, that is what comes through in the explorers’ chronicles and the work of research­ers alike: society is inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every society.

One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often than not it is unconscious, and so the more firmly anchored. Its immediate, spontaneous reference, while perhaps not the best known, is in any case the most familiar. In effect, each one of us carries within himself, internalized like the believer’s faith, the certitude that society exists for the State. How, then, can one conceive of the very existence of primitive socie­ties if not as the rejects of universal history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has been transcended ? Here one recognizes ethnocentrism’s other face, the complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every soci­ety is condemned to enter into that history and pass through the stages which lead from savagery to civilization.

[…] But the assertion of an obvious evolution cannot justify a doctrine which, arbitrarily tying the state of civilization to the civilization of the State, designates the latter as the necessary end result assigned to all societies.”

Pierre Clastres

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19th century Analytic theory Anarchism Books Europe Global Middle Ages

Mutual Aid : A factor in Evolution (1902)

Author(s)

Peter Kropotkin

Contents

“As soon as we study animals – not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains – we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society.

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts.

But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: ‘Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.”

Peter Kropotkin

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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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