I am writing this on the premise that you are a well-meaning person who wishes Occupy Wall Street to succeed. I am also writing as someone who was deeply involved in the early stages of planning Occupy in New York. I am also an anarchist who has participated in many Black Blocs. While I have...
“What I can’t understand is, why aren’t people rioting in the streets?” I hear this, now and then, from people of wealthy and powerful backgrounds. There is a kind of incredulity. “After all,” the subtext seems to read, “we scream bloody murder when anyone so much as threatens our tax shelters; if someone were to...
I. Politicians are by definition dishonest. All politicians lie. But many observers of American politics agree that over the last few years, there has been something of a qualitative change in the magnitude of political dishonesty. In certain party precincts, at least, there seems to have been a conscious attempt to change the rules to...
America is a country made possible by hucksterism and carnival buncombe. It is the birthplace of both modern PR and advertising, the first place on earth to apply techniques of commercial marketing to politics, and a country where, for at least thirty years, the economy has been driven by the engine of finance—that is, by...
Let me begin with a brief story about bureaucracy. Over the last year my mother had a series of strokes. It soon became obvious that she would eventually be incapable of living at home without assistance; since her insurance would not cover home care, a series of social workers advised us to put in for...
Part 1: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity We would like to offer some initial thoughts on exactly how the art world can operate simultaneously as a dream of liberation, and a structure of exclusion; how its guiding principle is both that everyone should really be an artist, and that this is absolutely and irrevocably not...
Abstract Many of the internal changes within anthropology as a discipline—particularly the “postmodern turn” of the 1980s—can only be understood in the context of broader changes in the class composition of the societies in which university departments exist, and, in particular, the role of the university in the reproduction of a professional-managerial class that has...
Remember those plucky Kurdish forces who so heroically defended the Syrian city of Kobane from Isis? They risk being wiped out by Nato. The autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava in Northeast Syria, which includes Kobane, faces invasion. A Nato army is amassing on the border, marshaling all the overwhelming firepower and high-tech equipment that only...
On Saturday, 16th October 2010, some 500 activists gathered at convergence points across London, knowing only that they were about to embark on a direct action called Crude Awakening, aimed against the ecological devastation of the global oil industry, but with no clear idea of what they were about to do. The plan was quite...
There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist. A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students...
On August 25th, 2020, during the George Floyd Uprising’s Hot Summer, rebels in Kenosha set a used car dealership ablaze. And as those Civics, Camrys, and Altimas bathed in flame, white teenagers nationwide felt a stinging in their brains, as a feeling of immense moral sentiment activated at the sight of charred F-150s. It was...
This essay was written in the fall of 1991, six months before the Los Angeles uprising, for a New Politics symposium on the question “Is There Life after the AFL-CIO?” In it, Ignatiev considers how white supremacy has shaped American social democracy and fragmented the revolutionary potential of the American working class. The editors of...
And he gave it for his opinion that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground, where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together. SWIFT THERE...
SOCIALISTS AND ANARCHISTS IN THE MAIN, remarked Bertrand Russell, “are products of industrial life, and few among them have any practical knowledge on the subject of food production. But Kropotkin is an exception. His two books The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, are very full of detailed information, and, even making great...
HOW ARE WE TO APPROACH THE QUESTION OF THE LAND? We could attempt to treat the subject globally, and without even trying to define the precise proportion of the world’s population which is actually starving or in a condition of continual under-nourishment, we could emphasise the fact that agricultural production is far from keeping pace...