Reviews

by Ron Jacobs
The Counterpunch
January 15, 2016

by Miriam, Detroit
First of May Anarchist Alliance Minneapolis Collective

Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black. Toward a Queer of Color Critique. (Minneapolis, London. University of Minnesota Press. 2004. Critical American Studies Series.)

Left Behind: Why Marxists Need Anarchists, and Vice Versa

Malcolm Harris
December 20th, 2015
Los Angeles Review of Books

Unruly Equality : U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century
Andrew Cornell
University of California Press
01.13.2016
416 pages

IN AN 1875 letter to German socialist politician August Bebel, Friedrich Engels complained — on behalf of himself and Karl Marx — about being teased by anarchists. Bebel’s Social Democratic Workers’ Party was merging with the General German Workers’ Association, the latter of which advocated a parliamentary road to socialism rather than a revolutionary one.

By Ramor Ryan
TeleSur
December 2, 2015

Paul White’s new book, “The PKK – Coming Down from the Mountains,” is a useful critical analysis exploring the group’s history and ideological evolution.

Kurdish liberation forces have come to global attention as the front-line defenders in the heroic battle against the marauding Islamic State group threat on the ground in northern Syria.

Hand in hand with beating back the advance of the Islamic State group, the Syrian Kurds – organized in People’s Protection Units (YPG) – are also implementing a democratic revolution within the liberated territory of Rojava, part of the historic homeland of the Kurdish people.

To better contextualize these rebels–currently supported by US-led coalition air strikes, and also a source of inspiration for leftists the world over – one must look beyond Syria into the greater Kurdish region, and at the YPG’s much-larger affiliate, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Review by Chuck Morse
Institute for Anarchist Studies

Murray Bookchin was a pivotal, polarizing figure in the post-WWII history of anarchism. He put ecology and democracy on the anarchist agenda in a way that was as novel as it is enduring. As a polemicist, he spent decades at the center of crucial debates about history, strategy, and foundational ideals. Even his critics must acknowledge that he made major contributions to the growth and clarification of the anarchist perspective.

Something shifted in the movement when he died in 2006. For the preceding fifty years, his writings had been a point of reference through which we could clarify our views, even when we disagreed with them, whereas now that he was gone we had to make sense of him. Who was he and how had he lived? These are compelling questions for those who had worked with him and for anyone who wants to understand contemporary anarchism.

by Bongani Mavundla.

The spectre of Anarchism haunts all societies that are riddled with turmoil, economic exploitation and political oppression, especially after the defeat of the Spanish revolution (wrongly dubbed the Spanish Civil War) of 1936 until 1939.

Today the world is seeing an anarchist experiment being established and this time around it is in a place called Rojava, in Kurdistan. "Our World , Rojava" is a documentary that details the experiences of the Kurdish people in their fight for self reliance and self determination in a territory that they call Rojava, made up of parts of Syria, Turkey and Iraq.

Armed with Murray Bookchins' ideology of democratic confederalism, the Kurdish leftists have established a radical, egalitaran, multi-ethnic ministate [sic.] running along Bookchin's communalist economic model. The documentary shows how this liberatory project is a product of the Kurdish people's historical and politico-existential struggles.

By Staughton Lynd
ZNet
August 18, 2015

A Review Essay of Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908-1938, ed. and translated by Mitchell Abidor (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015)

Andrej Grubacic and I have suggested the importance of synthesizing two radical traditions, anarchism and Marxism.  (Wobblies and Zapatistas, pp. 11-12, 98-99.)

In search of efforts in this direction in the United States, we called attention to the “Chicago idea” of two of the Haymarket anarchists, Albert Parsons and August Spies.  Speaking to the jury and a packed courtroom before he was sentenced to death, Parsons distinguished two forms of socialism: state socialism, which meant government control of everything, and anarchism, an egalitarian society without a controlling authority.  (James Green, Death in the Haymarket, p. 238.)

by Michelle Renée Matisons and Alexander Reid Ross
The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS)

The Radical Turn?

by Anarcho
Anarchist Writers
6/6/2015

What is it about anthropologists and anarchism? Noted anarchists Brian Morris and David Graeber are anthropologists in their day jobs while Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus both made significant contributions to the field. Perhaps it is simple enough – anthropology shows that people have lived in many different ways and so confirms a basic principle of anarchism: capitalism is just one of many systems and, like others, can be replaced with something else.

Good Marx or Bad Marx?

by John Clark

Fifth Estate # 393, Spring 2015

a review of
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Newly translated & annotated by Ken Knabb,
Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014, 150 pages. $15. bopsecrets.org

For those interested in Situationist ideas, this is an auspicious time to reconsider Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, originally published in 1967. Ken Knabb’s recently revised translation is a valuable resource for the study of Debord and the Situationists.