"Caffentzis is a practical philosopher and a pure teacher. His reasoning even at its most abstract always tends to the political. The street is his class room. The apothegm becomes the slogan, thought has its telos in action. Or conversely, the slogan (say No Blood for Oil ) becomes the starting point of reasoning which develops with the variation, iteration, and counterpoint of a Bach fugue. Its beauty lies not with the teacher but the student (you and I). This is truly vulgar Marxism, that is, it is a critique by, with, and for the vulgus, or common people (again, you and I). The word essay means an attempt, but these succeed. They succeed as addresses, as rules, as axioms, as maxims elucidating the double mystery: on one side is the sphinx, the schizoid reasoning, the tricks behind our backs, the cipher text, the code, and the fetish. On the other side are the actualities of class war the cruelties, the homelessness, the return of plagues, the sinking boats, the drowning children, the factory fires, the poisoned rivers, the collapsing mines. While the oil industry is the concrete universal of contemporary capitalism, the condition of oil and the condition of capitalism are not the same. He elucidates the foundational concepts of Marx s critique of political economy commodity, constant capital, rent, dead labor, surplus value, and the dynamic relations depending on these concepts the falling rate of profit or the organic composition of capital. These provide the monads of understanding, the irreducible elements of our situation. A moral-political black hole haunts the center, Value, whose quantified expressions as money commit the sin of naturalization but are hidden by trumpery and enforced by drones in the sky, by nuclear holocaust, by militarized police and policing military. Like the fool to its folly, Capital continuously returns to its vomit, offering us only an acocalypse of heat-death." — Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto

"The papers in this collection are weapons we use to deconstruct the politics of war and oil, to uncover the multilayered class meaning of contemporary energy policy, and are the treasure that gives us a different sense of alternatives. Caffentzis' critical understanding dissolves the fatalism of peak-oil arguments and posits our struggles to reclaim the commons as the real limit of capitalist use of energy." — Massimo de Angelis, author of The Beginning of History

Yodel in Hi-Fi explores the vibrant and varied traditions of yodelers around the world. Far from being a quaint and dying art, yodel is a thriving vocal technique that has been perennially renewed by singers from Switzerland to Korea, from Colorado to Iran. Bart Plantenga offers a lively and surprising tour of yodeling in genres from opera to hip-hop and in venues from cowboy campfires and Oktoberfests to film soundtracks and yogurt commercials. Displaying an extraordinary versatility, yodeling crosses all borders and circumvents all language barriers to assume its rightful place in the world of music.

“A triumph of cheeky erudition that demonstrates beyond any doubt the international ubiquity of goofy yet profound chest-to-head vocal acrobatics in a legion of longstanding, continuously evolving musical styles. Bart Plantenga is an original thinker and a truly gifted writer blessed with vision, wit, and passion.” —James P. Leary, author of Polkabilly and Yodeling in Dairyland

The influential author of White Racism: A Psychohistory; The Age of Desire; History and Spirit; Red Hunting in the Promised Land; The Enemy of Nature and the controversial Overcoming Zionism, among others, offers a memoir of his first 80 years, from his early Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn, New York, his Yale and Columbia medical training, his years as a psychiatrist, Reichian psychoanalyst and subsequent academic career, to his embracing of Marxist political economy and commitment to radical ecosocialism. Highlights include his 1998 Green Party candidacy for the US Senate, his campaign in 2000 for the Green nomination for President of the United States, his work with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and his recent Christian spiritual conversion.

“Max Cafard’s profound exercise in what he calls ‘anarchography’ is an attempt to say the unsayable (ineffable), a meditation in the form of fragments on the fragments left by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. But Cafard, an obvious pseudonym with many associations (Kafka, blues, jazz, roaches etc.), interprets him in a radically dialectical way, particularly inspired by taoism, Zen, Surrealism, and certain strands of anarchism. Cafard offers a ruthless critique of things as they are on behalf of ‘divine justice,’ and claims persuasively that Heraclitus taught that opposition brings concord and at the heart of all things is “anarchic harmony.” Cafard champions nothing less than ‘the Custom of Chaos’ in this brilliant and profound series of original meditations, which not only provides new insights into the meaning of the philosopher’s work but touches upon some of the most important and urgent subjects confronting us today. It is further wonderfully illustrated by Michel Varisco’s photos of abandoned industrial landscapes in the Louisiana region and the life-affirming beauty of its trees, plants, water and waterways. What we do to nature is illuminated by what nature, within us all, does to us.” — Peter Marshall

Book as magpie’s nest or mosaic made up of bits of other books, this work aims to give a thick impression of a single Egyptian city, Akhmim, called by the Greeks Panopolis, “city of Pan.’’ As a time machine, this book will take the reader back to the 5th century AD, when the last champions of Paganism were battling against the coming triumph of Christianity. Alchemy, Magic, Gnosticism, Greco-Egyptian religion, psychotropic ritual and other syncretistic elements mingled to give birth to Hermeticism, a still-living tradtion which provides us with the means to appreciate the voyage we will make into a Past that is not dead.

Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2017! Our 25th annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective. Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever! Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

"As you've no doubt guessed, we Old Calendrists are in fact a bunch of bitter rancorous aging hippies who used to believe in Flower Power and Dropping Out and Doing Your Own Thing, and we are now discontented and disgusted by PoMo Post-Civlization, reduced to cynicism and despair by the Triumph of Money and the technologization of consciousness itself. Nevertheless, although incapable of any facile optimism, we cling to our old anti-pessimism — and continue to hope that Time can be redeemed through strategic revolutionizing of the very system of its measurement — a return to a-chronic (neo) paleolithic laziness — a permanent vacation."

What remains of being human when everything is lost? After a cataclysm destroyed their world, the dregs of Charnholm made what lives they could along its stony coast. They toil to keep flesh on their bones, and to get clean water from the richards, who live in shelter caves high above the harbor, guarded by mercenaries. To amuse themselves, the richards hold Rat Hunts in which the boldest young dregs, the Rat Hunt Boys, spear plague-ridden vermin; always in danger of a thrust from the fangs of these mutant creatures. As the Hunt grows increasingly deadly, a conspiracy begins brewing to topple the elite and abolish the dangerous game. This is the tale of how they came to rebel, and what success they had.

“In a society of dregs serving the richards in myriad roles — rope dancers, smiths, scutmen, scavengers, harem horii, beaters, rat hunt boys, and rimers — it is Mary Kath M’Cool, apprentice rimer anathematizing rats with verse for hunt boys to more easily skewer, who one day asks her beloved brother, Finn, ‘Are we no the many, they the few? Nobbut a few shelter caves and hundreds of dregs?’ Half the pleasure in reading The Rat Hunt Boys is following the four children of Cider Mother into awareness of who they are and where they could be, and half is the fertile and alliterative, lovely-gruesome, bramble-lyric lexicon Anna Mockler coined to transport us to Charnholm a generation after The Burning where light-boned, agile spawn go spag diving to keep the lamps lit, and dregs sing the revolution.’’ — Amy Holman

“Anna Mockler expertly employs brilliant Swiftian satire, visceral surrealism, and bracing historical fiction smoldering with gothic overtones and riddled with vibrant, sprawling, and rabidly urgent storytelling in this highly potent kaleidoscopic orgy of a post-apocalyptic epic. Expansive, incredibly imaginative, entirely singular and an absolute pleasure to read.’’ — Donald Breckenridge

“The perfect story to read aloud either to your elders or youngsters, whomever is stranger. If language is a virus, as Burroughs put it, this strain of pidgin is mutantly vaccine resistant, bubonic in its intensity; a queerly affecting tale of creatures ravaged by apocalyptic misadventure.’’ — Kevin Riordan

“Ron Kolm’s Night Shift stands alongside other wage-slave masterpieces like Charles Bukowski’s Factotum and Harvey Pecar’s American Splendor. Winking and grinning in the face of punch-clock death, Kolm finds a way to somehow stay alive and even to eventually triumph. One senses in these moving and sometimes hilarious little vignettes that Kolm wrote them in flagrante dilecto; a gypsy moth blue collar poet-scholar recording his emergence from sooty cocoon to winging oracle of the smokestacks, junkyards, tenements and roads of the national creep-scape.’’ — Alan Kaufman, author of Drunken Angel; editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Literature

“Kolm has always been a true NYC poet, with a sensitive urbanity and absurdist humor that barely looks both ways as taxis filled with rich yupsters swerve around downwardly mobile moppets with new wave beards. His is a voice that realizes the foreverness of beat vision. Where we all come together to love the noise of the great metropolis we are lucky to have this guy in the room.” — Thurston Moore, author of Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture and Stereo Sanctity -– Lyrics & Poems

“Ron Kolm is an American original and Night Shift is a testament to a life lived in the margins — which is where the real action has always been. Wise, ribald, human, unexpectedly soulful, these stories have the grit and rhythm of real live as filtered through a sensibility finely tuned to the absurd and comic.’’ — Michael Lindgren reviews for the Brooklyn Rail, L Magazine and Rain Taxi

A collection of little seen (or unpublished) writings from one of the most interesting, well-traveled, controversial, iconoclastic thinkers (and good writers!) of his time.

Included are an interview (done by Antero Alli) originally published in Ravenmagazine in 1994, "The Caravan of Summer" originally in Gnosis in 1996, "My Summer Vacation in Afghanistan", "Roses and Nightingales," and "Grange Appeal," all published in Fifth Estate in the early 2000s, and a previously unpublished interview done with High Times.

Table of Contents
Summer Camp & Hobo Poetics
interview by Antero Alli
The Caravan of Summer
My Summer Vacation in Afghanistan
Roses and Nightingales
Grange Appeal
1994 interview with High Times