From workers autonomy to social autonomy: the experience of Socialisme ou Barbarie. An interview with Daniel Blanchard - Amador Fernández-Savater
Libertarian socialism: a practical outline - Gaston Leval
In this pamphlet first published in Switzerland in 1959, Gaston Leval depicts a transitional society—largely modeled on the Spanish collectives of 1936-39—characterized by: a confederal structure of vertically and horizontally integrated enterprise committees and industrial federations; economic planning; the use of “symbolic money” wages “to facilitate and regulate distribution”; the crucial importance of agriculture and thus the persistence of a certain amount of private property in the agricultural sector; the vital role of cooperatives; and the primacy of consumption over production.
Drafts of The civil war in France - Karl Marx
Epub of Marx's Drafts for The Civil War in France. Text taken from marxists.org.
Pajaud, Séraphine (1858- after 1934)
The progress of domestication - René Riesel
René Riesel’s reflections on the anti-GMO sabotage campaigns of 1998-2001 in France, the subsequent responses of the supporters of GMO research, the Montpellier and Agen trials and the resulting opportunistic political manipulations and media circuses, and the broader implications of GMOs, and the loyal opposition that wants to reinforce the power of the state in order to regulate them, within the context of the accelerating “domestication” and totalitarian conditioning of the population in a society he characterizes as a “world-laboratory where the sterilization of historical life is assayed”.
From Celine to the videoclip - Anselm Jappe
Anselm Jappe discusses the life and works of Celine and their relation to the populist politics of resentment, Nazi propaganda, and the mass culture of the postwar era, noting that Celine’s lauded style, in its consonance with his “ideological delusions”, meets Hitler’s definition of propaganda (“it is not about convincing, but about the power of suggestion” and emotions) and that, while Celine’s “… endless succession of fragments, almost devoid of meaning if one takes them in isolation, which are intended to stimulate immediate impulses, recall the techniques of Goebbels, they also prefigure a totalitarian technique that would only make its appearance a few decades later: the videoclip.”
Obsolete communism: The left wing alternative - Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit
In May '68, a student protest at Nanterre University spread to other universities, to Paris factories, and in a few weeks, to most of France. On May 13, a million Parisians marched. Ten million workers went out on strike. At the center of the fray, from the beginning, was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, expelled from Nanterre for his agitation. Obsolete Communism was written in the five weeks immediately following the French State regaining control. No account of May '68, or indeed of any rebellion, can match its immediacy or urgency.