Anarchoblogs

Good news, everyone. From Crispin Sartwell’s blog comes the announcement that his study on Political Aesthetics is now available for free online:

cornell tells me we can’t expect a paperback of political aesthetics anytime soon, so i’m putting the pdf of the proofs up onlne. i really think this is my best book.

— Crispin Sartwell at cheese it, the cops! (25 February 2013)

PDF is available here through Google Docs, and I’ve mirrored a copy here. Contents and a bit of the thesis:

Crispin Sartwell, Political Aesthetics

• Introduction: The Idea of Political Aesthetics
• Ch. 1. Leni Riefenstahl Meets Charlie Chaplin: Aesthetics of the Third Reich
• Ch. 2. Artphilosophical Themes
• Ch. 3. Dead Kennedys and Black Flags: Artpolitics of Punk
• Ch. 4. Prehistory of Political Aesthetics
• Ch. 5. Red, Gold, Black, and Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics
• Ch. 6. Arthistorical Themes
• Ch. 7. Political Power and Transcendental Geometry: Republican Classicism in Early America
• Ch. 8. Conclusion: Political Styles and Aesthetic Ideologies
• Appendix: Suggestions for Further Study

Introduction: The Idea of Political Aesthetics

There are, of course, many connections between art and politics. For example regimes of all sorts—democratic, monarchical, communist, and all the rest—use and repress the arts in various ways for propagandistic purposes, to control or deflect public opinion. And much of what we take as fine art has explicitly political themes; this is truer now than ever, or was truer twenty years ago than ever, as artists expressed feminist, antiracist, animal rights, or AIDS activist ideology in their work, for example. These are important areas for investigation. But what I am calling the program or inquiry of political aesthetics begins with a claim that I think is stronger and more interesting.

Not all art is political, but all politics is aesthetic; at their heart, political ideologies, systems, and constitutions are aesthetic systems, multimedia artistic environments. The political content of an ideology can be understood in large measure actually to be—to be identical with—its formal and stylistic aspects. It’s not that a political ideology or movement gets tricked out in a manipulative set of symbols or design tropes; it’s that an ideology is an aesthetic system, and that this is what moves or fails to move people, attracts their loyalty or repugnance, moves them to act or to apathy. But the political function of the arts—including various crafts and design practices—is not merely a matter of manipulation and affect: the aesthetic expression of a regime or of the resistance to a regime are central also to the cognitive content and concrete effects of political systems. . . .

— Crispin Sartwell (2010), Political Aesthetics

So I guess it turns out that the world didn’t really turn color sometime in the 1930s?

This is from 1922, and is one of the earliest recordings ever of natural color on film. You can see it again now because technological civilization is awesome.

This clip is a very early, full-color Kodachrome film made by Kodak in 1922 to test new film stock and color processing. . . . The color and lighting are exquisite—all warm reds with flattering highlights—making it a purely enjoyable thing to watch. In 1922, for all its technical achievements, Kodak hadn’t yet done away with the flicker that gave movies one of their earliest and most enduring nicknames: the “flicks.” The flicker resulted from variations in film speed produced by the slow, hand-cranked cameras of the time and by variations in the density of the film itself . . . .

— Joan Neuberger, This 1922 Kodachrome Test Footage is Strangely Bewitching, in The Vault at Slate (February 8, 2013)

I just spent a couple hours on Facebook arguing about the relationships amongst Sauron and the Balrogs over the course of the First and Third Ages. This convinces me that it is time for a nerd contest. The contest for to-day is favorite Tolkien passages. So, what’s your favorite passage from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien? (Favorite in whatever sense you like.) Post it in the comments or on your own blog.

Note 1. Any work from the hand of J.R.R. Tolkien will do.^[1]

Note 2. It is perfectly O.K. to have more than one favorite. I sure do.

Note 3. Feel free to post it with, or without, anything you might want to say about why it’s your favorite.

Note 4. If you hate Tolkien, or just don’t care about Tolkien, or just aren’t feeling it today, post your favorite passage from something else at least equally nerdy.

Here’s one of mine. I’ll probably have more to post in the comments, but The Silmarillion is what was ready at hand, so there is this.

But Húrin did not look at the stone, for he knew what was written there; and his eyes had seen that he was not alone. Sitting in the shadow of the stone there was a woman, bent over her knees; and as Húrin stood there silent she cast back her tattered hood and lifted her face. Grey she was and old, but suddenly her eyes looked into his, and he knew her; for though they were wild and full of fear, that light still gleamed in them that long ago had earned her the name Eledhwen, proudest and most beautiful of mortal women in the days of old.

You come at last, she said. I have waited too long.

It was a dark road. I have come as I could, he answered.

But you are too late, said Morwen. They are lost.

I know it, he said. But you are not.

But Morwen said, Almost. I am spent. I shall go with the sun. Now little time is left: if you know, tell me! How did she find him?

But Húrin did not answer, and they sat beside the stone, and did not speak again; and when the sun went down Morwen sighed and clasped his hand, and was still; and Húrin knew that she had died.

— J.R.R. Tolkien (1977/1999), The Silmarillion, Ch. 22 Of the Ruin of Doriath, p. 229.

1. ^[1] Including the ones that were redacted by Christopher Tolkien; whether canonical, deuterocanonical, or apocryphal. ↩

Here’s a thing. It’s an idea I picked up from Facebook. (Not a meme. There are no memes.)

1. Grab the closest book to you.

2. Turn to page 52.

3. Post the 5th sentence. Copy these instructions along with the post.

This actually turned out to be impossible to fulfill. The nearest book at hand^[1] was Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology. But p. 52 of that book doesn’t have 5 sentences. (It just has a short paragraph closing out the Introduction of the anthology.) The second nearest book was John Stoltenberg’s Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice; but p. 52 of my edition is the blank back of a section title page. I finally got a book that could possibly meet the requirements of the game with the third-nearest; so, by way of a game attempt, here’s the right sentence from the right page of Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, by Michael Davis (Viking, 2008). This is from a chapter which is mostly following some folks working on Captain Kangaroo at CBS, who would later end up as key figures in the Children’s Television Workshop. Anyway, sentence 5 is the especially enlightening record of the fact that:

[Jon] Stone worked for two game shows that, as he recalled, bent the rules.

— Michael Davis (2008), Street Gang, p. 52.

Well, so have I, just now, I suppose.

1. ^[1] I am not counting Distro booklets which I printed myself. In any case hardly any of those have 52 pages. ↩

R.I.P. Adrienne Rich (1929-2012).. This is from a letter of hers written in July 1997:

… [T]he meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. … There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

— Adrienne Rich, Letter to Jane Alexander Refusing the National Medal for the Arts (July 3, 1997). In Voices of a People’s History of the United States (eds. Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove), p. 580.

And this is from one of her poems, On Edges (1968).

… Crossing the bridge I need all my nerve
to trust to the man-made cables.

The blades on that machine could cut you to ribbons
but its function is humane.
Is this all I can say of these delicate books, scythe-curved intentions
you and I handle? I’d rather
taste blood, yours or mine, flowing
from a sudden slash, than cut all day
with blunt scissors on dotted lines
like the teacher told.

— Adrienne Rich (1968), On Edges

R.I.P. Earl Scruggs (1924-2012). This is from Crispin Sartwell’s blog:

earl scruggs was among the handful of great instrumental innovators in twentieth-century american popular music. comparable figures are people like louis armstrong, little walter, jimi hendrix. the banjo in his hands yields an amazing combination of rhythm and melody: it’s the most percussive of the string instruments, and scruggs created the role of the banjo virtuoso in bluegrass: during his solo, he drives the band faster and faster, like an accelerating train….

So I’ve mentioned already that I did a book event a while back with Roderick back in Auburn, and that I am going to be in Austin, Texas this weekend to do a couple more book events for Markets Not Capitalism. What I’ve been working on, behind the scenes, but haven’t announced publicly yet is that these are just the first two legs in a seat-of-the-pants sort of book tour that I’ve been working to put together over the next few months. In addition to the events this weekend in Austin, there are also confirmed events in late February in and around Nashua, New Hampshire, and in mid-March in Asheville, North Carolina. As with all these events, I’ll be doing a brief talk, a reading, Q&A and book-signing. (In New Hampshire I’ll also be holding down tables at Liberty Forum and AltExpo with a wide selection of left-libertarian and market anarchist literature.)

Editor and contributor Charles Johnson will be here for a discussion of his new book, Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty (Autonomedia, Nov. 2011).

Individualist anarchists believe in mutual exchange, not economic privilege. They believe in freed markets, not capitalism. They defend a distinctive response to the challenges of global capitalism and social justice: eliminate the political privileges that prop up capitalists. The economic crisis needs fresh new responses, which emphasize the ways in which poverty and economic inequality have resulted from collusion between government and big business, which has enriched a few corporate giants at the expense of the rest of us. Rather than turning back to politics, the authors argue that working people must begin to free themselves of the mistakes of the past, and work together to take back control over their own lives and livelihoods through individual freedom, mutual exchange, human-scale markets and nonviolent grassroots social activism. Books for sale, books signed, discussion to be had, Q&A to follow. Come on down!

Charles Johnson (b. 1981) is a market anarchist writer from Auburn, Alabama. He is a member of Occupy Auburn and the Industrial Workers of the World, and a Research Associate at the Molinari Institute. He has published the Rad Geek People’s Daily weblog at radgeek.com since 2001, and is a frequent speaker and columnist on radical responses to the economic crises, stateless social activism, and the philosophy of anarchism.

Here are the dates we’ve got more-or-less confirmed so far:

• Austin, Tex. February 4 at Brave New Books and February 5 at MonkeyWrench Books

• Nashua, New Hampshire. February 23-26 at New Hampshire Liberty Forum and AltExpo #10. Local bookstore event(s) TBA.

• Asheville, North Carolina. March 15 at Firestorm Cafe & Books. Happy Tyrannicide Day, y’all!

Interested? I hope I’ll see you somewhere along the road! Come on down to one if you can; invite your friends; spread the word. I’m excited; these events are always a lot of fun, and vital to helping get the word out, and I’d like to do what I can to keep this market anarchist roadshow going as long as can be managed. If you’re interested and able, here’s a couple things that you can do to help keep it running.

1. Set it up! If you would like to get an event in your neighborhood, and you know a good space to get in touch with, contact me by e-mail or phone! Radical bookstores, infoshops and (A) community centers, and independent community bookstores are usually the best bet, but I’ll show up anywhere I’m invited to talk. I’m especially interested in dates that I might be able to connect with one of the existing appearances — I’m open for any stops along the way from Alabama to New Hampshire during the days before my appearances in Nashua; immediately after the appearance in Nashua, I’m going to be in Chicago, Ill. for other reasons (but if you’re interested in getting an event set up there, I’ll have the time; just let me know!). And I’m happy to add stops to the trip after Asheville in mid-March. (Or anywhere else, after the March 15th appearance.) I’m definitely willing to go just about anywhere east of the Continental Divide; for points West, get in touch with me anyway, as we might be able to hook something up with either me or Gary. Let me know what you think! Hopefully I’ll be adding more details and stops as they come in and get confirmed.

2. Chip in! If you want to support the progress of the rolling free-market anticapitalist caravan, you can help us out by tossing a few coins into the hat to help cover the costs of transportation and lodging. I’m working on as thin a shoestring as possible, by combining trips, packing a lunch and couch-surfing for crash spaces; with support from y’ALL, I can keep this going a lot longer and make the most of the opportunities to talk about market anarchism and free-market anticapitalism, make connections with local radicals, and put the good word out among our fellow Anarchists.

Here’s the shoestring so far, for reference. (Costs are estimated using AAA’s fuel cost calculator, etc. This budget may be revised as new events are added.) Donations go to the Molinari Institute; any proceeds above reimburseable expenses will go to support left-libertarian scholarship and market anarchist outreach.

Today Austin, tomorrow the world …

I am happy to announce that Markets Not Capitalism is coming to Austin, Texas next weekend. I will be appearing at Brave New Books near the UT campus, and MonkeyWrench Books in North Austin, for a talk / reading / Q&A / market anarchist shindig on Saturday, February 4, and Sunday, February 5. Books will be available for purchase, I’ll be available for discussion and signing, caffeine will be available for consumption; spontaneously-ordered sociality to follow. Come on down; invite yr friends!

I’ll be giving a brief talk at both events, and then a reading from the collected essays on the nature of capitalism, role of the State in creating and propping it up, the place of mutual exchange and individual ownership in a radical, bottom-up alternative, the radical possibilities of freed-market social activism, and the individualist and mutualist tendencies within the anticapitalist tradition. Q&A, discussion and book-signing will ensue.

Many, many thanks are due to Crystal of the Austin / Central Texas A.L.L., for suggesting and organizing both of these events. And many thanks also to the spaces that have generously agreed to host us. Brave New Books is an underground radical libertarian bookstore, located one block from the University of Texas. In addition to fiction and nonfiction about a wide variety of topics, they also host community events including film showings, community meetings, music, speakers, book signings, and more.

MonkeyWrench Books is an all volunteer, collectively-run radical bookstore in North Austin. They provide an extensive collection of radical literature and media, prioritizing books, magazines, movies and zines that you won’t find at your average corporate bookstore; they also provide a place for meetings, film screenings, workshops, benefits, book readings and performances. The store facilitates greater interaction among individuals and organizations working toward social and economic justice. It’s a place where both experienced organizers and people new to political activism can find support, information, and a range of progressive viewpoints. It’s also a relaxed space to network and make connections over a cup of organic coffee or tea.

I’ll see you there!

Do you have anything in Saving the Entertainment Industry?

(Via Facebook, originally published in Alternative Press Review, Fall 2000.)

Hey y’ALL,

So, this is just a brief note — a sort of placeholder — to mention that July 2011’s new Market Anarchy and Anarchist Classics Series booklets (No. 21 and No. 9, respectively) were finished on time and mailed out to subscribers on July 27. The official announcement has been delayed because the end of July also happened to be the exact time at which I, and with me the Alliance of the Libertarian Left Distro, went on a cross-country move from Las Vegas, Nevada to Auburn, Alabama. L. and I arrived safely in Alabama and we are in the process of getting settled in, but my print shop, the advance copies I’d already prepared, and all the rest of my office are not arriving for about a week. So, in the meantime, here’s a preview of what will soon be up for orders and available to the general public through the Distro website. Enjoy!

Coming Soon to an ALL Distro (Virtually) Near You…

Market Anarchy #21: Market Anarchy vs. Corporate Power or: “The Attitude of Anarchism Toward Industrial Combinations,” by Benjamin Tucker (1899)

Anarchist Classics Series #9: Problems of Anarchism: Property, Labor & Competition selected articles by William Bailie (1893)

See you all again when the dust settles….

An official announcement and links for non-subscribers to order the new booklets will be up in about a week.

tl;dr. Two beautiful new booklets are available for ordering to-day from the ALL Distro — this month’s Market Anarchy, with an article on truly public property — public property, that is, without state control — and this month’s Anarchist Classic, with a Spencerian-Mutualist take on the Economics of Anarchy, by the insurrectionary mutualist Dyer D. Lum. You can get one free sample copy of either series (or both) to check out, if you’re considering a monthly subscription for individual copies or monthly packs to distribute in the radical space of your choice. Sound good? Contact me for details.

Scatter tracts, like raindrops, over the land….

—William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, March 1831.

To-day, I am happy to announce this month’s two additions to the Alliance of the Libertarian Left Artwork & Agitprop Distro. They debuted on Saturday at this year’s Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair, and now, gentle reader, they come to you. Issue #20 (June 2011) of the monthly Market Anarchy Zine Series is a formulation by Roderick Long, on the right to public property in a stateless society. Issue #8 of the Anarchist Classics Zine Series is an edition of Dyer D. Lum’s The Economics of Anarchy, a fascinating Spencerian-Mutualist account of ownership and labor in a free society.

Here we are:

Market Anarchy #20 (Jun’11). Reclaim the Commons! Public Property Without the State Roderick T. Long (1998)

An individualist anarchist analysis and defense of rights to public property — not property that belongs to government, but property that belongs to the public — you and me and our neighbors. Libertarians often assume that a free society will be one in which all (or nearly all) property is private…. To most people, ‘public property’ means ‘government property.’ As an anarchist, I do not advocate government property of any sort. But this is not the only kind of public property. Throughout history, legal doctrine has recognized, alongside property owned by the the public as organized into a state and represented by government officials, an additional category of property owned by the unorganized public. This was property that the public at large was deemed to have a right of access to, but without any presumption that government would be involved in the matter at all. It is public property in this sense that I am defending…. It is true that private property provides a protected sphere of free decision-making – for the property’s owners. But what is the position of those who are not property owners? A system of exclusively private property certainly does not guarantee them ‘a place to stand.’ Far from providing a sphere of independence, a society in which all property is private thus renders the propertyless completely dependent on those who own property…. It is true that users of public property face a somewhat greater risk from their fellow users than users of private property do. By the same token, however, public property allows more freedom. That is why the best option is a society that makes room for both public and private property. Those who place a high value on security, and are willing to put up with burdensome restrictions in order to get it, will be free to patronize private property, while those who seek self-expression, are averse to restrictions, and are willing to put up with more risk from others will likewise be free to patronize public property…. $1.25 for 1; 75¢/ea in bulk.

Anarchist Classics #8 (Jun’11). The Economics of Anarchy A Study of the Industrial Type Dyer D. Lum (1890)

I have repeatedly been asked to write a brief summary of the aims sought by Anarchists which could be read and discussed in the various clubs that are studying economic questions. With this end in view the following pages are submitted, trusting that they may be a help to those who are earnestly seeking the rationale of the Labor Question…. FREE EXCHANGE … would break the monopoly now possessed by currency, the instrument of exchange, and also could open full use of the possession of land…. Has the workman equal freedom to compete with the employer of labor? … But why not? Because behind the capitalist, as we now find him, privilege lends support which transforms the result of honest industry into a hideous Moloch standing with outstretched arms to receive as sacrificial victims the toilers who have made that capital possible…. Capital itself is man’s best friend, the true social savior that opens the march of progress and that has transformed society from warlike to peaceful pursuits. But under the crucifying hands of legalization, where prerogative mocks at penury, its mission is thwarted and it becomes a ravenous beast…. Reliance upon militant measures, trying to curb indus­ trial discontent by legislative coercion, is reactionary in character. However disguised in twilight mixtures it is the spirit of the old regime seeking to dominate the new; as vain as seeking to check an exhaustless flow of water by damming the stream. The remedy cannot lie in enactments, in the organ­ization of systems, in return to simplicity of structure, for industrial civilization demands plasticity of forms … while organization, on the other hand, ever tends to rigidity…. Dyer Lum was among the most labor-oriented of the American mutualists, working actively as a labor organizer and maintaining close working ties with August Spies, Albert Parsons, and many of the other Chicago Communists — he actually took over publishing The Alarm after Parsons and the other Haymarket martyrs were hanged. Unlike Tucker, who officially rejected any concern with questions of ownership and employment, so long as workers were fully freed from monopolistic constraints on their bargaining power, Lum’s book is a defense of mutual enterprise and worker ownership. But he also explicitly rejects communism and defends private property and free exchange — which Lum approaches with a fascinating appropriation of Herbert Spencer’s distinction between the militant type and the industrial type of society, characterized respectively by violence, domination and rigidity, on the one hand; and peace, productivity, equality and plasticity on the other.[1] Lum is also notable as an insurrectionist — a sort of bomb throwing revolutionary Mutualist. There’s a common, and really grossly mistaken, stereotype that the Collectivist and Communist Anarchists in America were the revolutionaries, and the Individualists and the Mutualists were Philosophical Anarchists who had no immediate plan to overthrow government, and for the time being counseled only education and moral agitation.[2] But this is wrong, as a general thing,[3] and Lum in particular is a huge, obvious counterexample — a defender of revolutionary politics and of the Chicago martyrs, who smuggled the dynmite caps to the imprisoned Louis Lingg. In Economics the issue appears mostly in the background — with the occasional adversions to, e.g., the relationship between Garrison’s agitation and Brown’s insurrection — but it is approached directly in an extended discussion in the final chapter, a Digression on Methods. $2.00 for 1; $1.50/ea in bulk.

As I’ve mentioned in past months, both the Market Anarchy Zine Series and the new Anarchist Classics Zine Series have become regular monthly publications. One issue in each series is published every month. New issues are normally announced during the first week of each month, and mailed out during the third week of the month. (This month, as you can see, the announcement has been deferred in order to focus on preparing the new issues, and other wares, for the Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair. But we should be returning to our regular schedule in July.) You can order individual copies online or contact me to sign up for a regular subscription, either for personal reading or bulk orders for distributing, tabling, or stocking local infoshops and other radical spaces. If you’re considering subscribing, you can contact me to request a free sample copy for you to check out, compliments of the Distro; then, if you like it, continue the subscription for the rest of the year at the following rates:

Market Anarchy Zine Series
Delivered each month	Individuals	Bulk Distribution Packets
	$1.50/issue (= $18/year)	No. of copies ✕ 80¢/issue (= N ✕ $9.60/year)
Anarchist Classics Zine Series
Delivered each month	Individuals	Bulk Distribution Packets
	$2.25/issue (= $27/year)	No. of copies ✕ $1.25/issue (= N ✕ $15/year)

For details on all your options (including ready-to-print electronic versions, customization with local contact information, and discounts for quarterly shipments), see Market Anarchy Mailed Monthly.

Prices include shipping & handling costs. If you decide not to continue the subscription, the sample issue is yours to keep. Intrigued? Contact me forthwith and we’ll get something worked out.

That’s all for now. Next month, you can look forward to some free-market environmentalism and the long-lost problems of an individualist. Until then—read and enjoy!

See also:

• GT 2011-05-07: M@ Mailed Monthly (May 2011): Ideas and Letters, Natural Liberty and Artifical Scarcity
• GT 2011-04-21: M@ Mailed Monthly (April 2011): Five Theses and a Vindication
• GT 2011-03-31: Market Anarchy Mailed Monthly
• GT 2010-02-17: The present anarchy of our commerce: booklets and buttons for March 2010
• GT 2007-11-23: The present anarchy of our commerce: t-shirts

1. ^[1] His use of the Spencerian distinction, and especially his opposition of militant rigidity to industrial plasticity is, I think, importantly connected with the common Mutualist emphasis on the character of markets as spaces for social experimentation and discovery; as Lum writes, The remedy cannot lie in enactments, in the organization of systems, in return to simplicity of structure, for industrial civilization demands plasticity of forms which the law of equal freedom alone gives, while organization, on the other hand, ever tends to rigidity…. ↩
2. ^[2] In another, and even more grossly mistaken oversimplification, it is often claimed that the former, allegedly Communist and revolutionary, kind of Anarchism was mainly or exclusively European, or imported to America by European immigrants, while the latter, allegedly Mutualist and philosophical, was a native American tradition, which allegedly derived from peculiarly American traditions, which had little or nothing to do with the European insurrectionism, and which was fundamentally different because it grew in a different soil. It’s another topic for another day, but for now suffice it to say that this whole attempted dichotomy is a farrago of nonsense, promoted on the one hand by Communists, who intended to discredit Mutualism as conservative, quietist, parochial and outmoded; and by later defenders of Mutualism, especially during the mid-20th century, who attempted to defend the tradition, by dissociating it from the charges of foreignness and violence directed against all forms of Anarchism in an age of red-baiting and nationalism. But the Communists are wrong about Mutualism, and the would-be friends of Mutualism would have done better to push back against belligerently idiotic 100%-Americanism than to try to pander to it. The reality is far more complicated, and Lum is as good a place as any to start if you want to get into it. ↩
3. ^[3] Tucker counseled more or less strict adherence to non-violent forms of struggle, like rent strikes and tax resistance. But any observer of the 20th century should be aware that non-violent struggle is not the same thing as non-struggle. In any case, beyond Tucker, American individualists had a wide range of views. The authors of A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery and In Defense of Emma Goldmann and the Right of Appropriation would be very surprised to learn that they were philosophical Anarchists who foreswore any kind of revolutionizing or violence. ↩