Opinion

Robert Zaretsky
THE STONE
New York Times
February 20, 2017

Nearly 50 years ago, Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” reached bookshelves in France. It was a thin book in a plain white cover, with an obscure publisher and an author who shunned interviews, but its impact was immediate and far-reaching, delivering a social critique that helped shape France’s student protests and disruptions of 1968.

Note: This piece is a reworked extract from my book Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010, http://www.akpress.org/anarchism-and-its-aspirations.html) for the Lexicon pamphlet series put together by the Institute for Anarchist Studies. You can download a PDF version and/or listen to an audio version of this pamphlet, along with the other four titles in this series, at of this pamphlet http://anarchiststudies.org/lexicon-pamphlet-series/.

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by Cindy Milstein

by Jakob Reimann
ROAR Magazine

Gigantic hopes were pinned on Barack Obama when he moved into the White House in 2009. Not just in the US, but across the globe people were simply fed up with eight unspeakable years of George W. Bush — with his nepotism, his belligerence and, yes, his sheer stupidity. The world was sick and tired of the “Cowboy from Texas.”

And then there came this highly intelligent, charismatic, eloquent — black — civil rights attorney from Illinois and everything was set to change. “Yes We Can” infected the whole world. “Hope and Change” were almost physically tangible to many. Yet Barack Obama has bitterly disappointed the world.
Dialogue and negotiations

by Wayne Price
Anarkismo

Under the title, "The Two Main Trends in Anarchism," a selection of my writings has been published in Greek. ΟΙ ΔΥΟ ΚΥΡΙΕΣ ΤΑΣΕΙΣ ΤΟΥ ΑΝΑΡΧΙΣΜΟΥ. The writings are taken from Anarkismo, except for the following, which was written originally for the new book. It focuses on the centrality of a vision of freedom, cooperation, and happiness in the program of anarchist-socialism.

by Zaher Baher
November 2016
Anarkismo.net

There is no doubt that over the last couple of decades our movement has declined dramatically . Not only it is not achievable anymore, in fact it cannot maintain what had already achieved before. It is also very clear that Marx's theory is not the remedy for the current situation any longer. I believe it is extremely hard to expect that the revolution to take place in the advanced industrialised countries, at least not in the very near future.

This article puts forward the argument of possibility that the revolution could happen in the less or non-industrialised countries, before the advanced industrialised countries.

The article explains the mechanisms that exist in the non-industrialised countries that brings about the revolution.

Where the revolution is more likely to happen, in developed or non-developing countries?

By Tom Wetzel
Ideas & Action

Most activists who use this “class reductionist” refrain don’t  just use it against syndicalism but against any emphasis on workplace struggle and organizing. It’s part of the so-called “retreat from class” of the past 30 years, especially in academic circles, where the charge originated.

The downplaying of race and gender was a general feature of the socialist movement in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. This should not be denied. However, there is nothing inherently class reductionist in syndicalism as a strategic orientation.

by William Gillis
Center for a Stateless Society

Anarchists tend to pose our core differences with marxists in terms of degrees of radicalism or rootedness. One of the classic ways this gets stated is that marxism deals with the political whereas we deal with the ethical.

These terms to the disagreement, once posed, are almost always immediately acknowledged and indeed embraced by both marxists and anarchists.

The following essay was written prior to the 2016 US election.

by Winter Jones
Ideas & Action
WSM

In case you are reading this well past October 2016, let me fill you in on how society was going. We had an upcoming presidential election here in the nation known as the United States of America. While it has always been clear to me that elections are total bullshit, I don’t think it was very clear for most people. The keyword here is “was”. As of at least mid-2016, it was clear to absolutely everyone that the government was far from democratic. We were being bombarded with messages telling us to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

A guest column by PG
CrimethInc

How should we understand the impending presidency of Donald Trump? What should we be prepared for? While some have framed Trump’s victory as a sign of resurgent fascism, our guest contributor argues that we should see it as the latest development in a much older phenomenon, which is not an interruption of democracy but intimately interlinked with it.

There are many ways to conceptualize the relationship between democracy and fascism, and this is a dangerous time to take anything for granted; we will be publishing more on this subject shortly. In the meantime, this is a useful contribution towards analyzing the dangers ahead and how to ready ourselves for them.

by Wayne Price
Saturday December 17, 2016
Anarkismo.net

The New Resistance

In demonstrations across the United States, protestors have raised signs saying, “Not My President!” Obviously they are not denying that state machinery has given Donald J. Trump the position of head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, ruler of the mightiest and wealthiest state in the world. What they are denying is Trump’s legitimacy for the position, his moral right to claim the presidency.

Under the capitalist system, electoral democracy serves several purposes. One is that it permits factions of the ruling capitalist elite to struggle over their different programs (based on differing interests) and to make final decisions—without civil wars or establishing a dictatorship (both of which can be costly).