[W]e have a conscious opponent, but one subject to a range of contradictions and resulting political limits—although not absolute ones. – Don Hamerquist, “Three Tendencies on Repression” After decades of defeat, the revolutionary left’s ability to provide prompt assessments of ruling-class composition and strategy has atrophied. The reader can be forgiven for being impressed that...
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE Opinions about Tolstoy and his work differ, but on one point there surely might be unanimity. A writer of world-wide reputation should be at least allowed to know how to spell his own name. Why should any one insist on spelling it “Tolstoi” (with one, two or three dots over the “i”), when...
We dedicate this zine to all Palestinians, including those who are fighting and resisting with the help of their God. Note on how we came to write this zine In 2023, a small town in the Swiss mountains was taken over by thousands of anarchists to learn, have fun and conspire together. It was the...
This won’t be what you are thinking it is. You are not herewith invited to be a spectator, or auditor, as I discourse about what I see to be the relevance of Jesus’ teachings for the present situation of the United Farmworkers (Cesar Chavez and people of that sort). No, things are going to come...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The Limits of Communalism When Abad de Santillán read the Confederal Declaration of Libertarian Communism in 1936, he was critical. The Leonese thinker believed it confused communism with communalism: “[The Declaration] speaks to us about everything, and in part with excessive detail, except for the organization of labor.” In the anarcho-syndicalist spirit of the time,...