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Bookchin: a Critical Appraisal

Damian F. White

This is the first comprehensive overview of the work of Murray Bookchin, the left-libertarian social theorist and political ecologist who is widely regarded as the visionary precursor of anti-corporate politics. Bookchin's writing spans fifty years and engages with a wide variety of issues: from ecology to urban planning, from environmental ethics to debates about radical democracy. Weaving insights from Hegel and Marx, Kropotkin and Mumford, Bookchin presents a critical theory whose central utopian message is 'things could be other than they are'. This accessible introduction maps the evolution of Bookchin’s project. It traces his controversial engagements with Marxism, anarchism, critical theory, postmodernism and eco-centric thought. It evaluates his attempt to develop a social ecology. Finally, it considers how his thinking relates to current debates in social theory and environmentalism, critical theory and philosophy, political ecology and urban theory. Offering a clear account of Bookchin's key themes, this book provides a critical but sympathetic account of the strengths and weaknesses of Bookchin's writing.

To Rob a Bank is an Honor. Lucio Urtubia

Paul Sharkey (trans)

For the first time in English, the life story of the revolutionary outlaw who brought Citibank to its knees. In 1981, Lucio Urtubia received a suitcase full of cash from Citibank executives, handed over the plates he'd used to forge 20 million dollars in traveler's checks, and walked away a free man. This is the true story of the most famous Robin Hood of the twentieth century, a lifelong anarchist who robbed from the rich to give to liberation struggles the world round. Born to a poor family in the Basque Country, Urtubia was conscripted into Franco's army at seventeen, where he began smuggling rations from military stores. In 1954, he fled to exile in Paris, where he learned to work as a mason, laying bricks by day and collaborating with Catalonian anarchists by night. Soon, he was planning bank heists to fund the Spanish struggle, stealing weapons, and masterminding the escape of resistance fighters. Following the uprisings of May 1968, Urtubia opened a printshop, producing political pamphlets while amassing a crew of operatives to counterfeit passports, ID cards, and workers' paychecks. By the late 70s, Urtubia hit on the plan that would make him infamous: changing the serial numbers on traveler's checks and depositing them simultaneously. Citibank's early global banking system offered the prime target, and checks spread to revolutionary movements in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. "He who robs a thief is a thousand times forgiven," Urtubia argued. Over decades, Urtubia funneled material support to groups including the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, the Black Panthers in the US, and the ETA Basque separatists. Told with Urtubia's characteristic warmth and humor, To Rob a Bank Is an Honor collects the adventures and political convictions of this larger-than-life figure of an incendiary era.

Rethinking Anarchy

Carlos Taibo. The Autonomies Collective (trans)

A comprehensive overview of anarchism showing its continued relevance and the challenges it faces in the twenty-first century.

Luigi Galleani: the Most Dangerous Anarchist in America

Antonio Senta. Andrea Asali & Sean Sayers (trans)

The first English biography of a neglected anarchist revolutionary who was wanted by governments on two continents.

Anarchy in the USSR. A New Beginning

Philip Ruff (ed)

Seventy years after the death of Kropotkin, the massacre of the Kronstadt Commune and the rout of Makhno, the Party which outlawed anarchism in Russia has itself become a banned organization. But anarchy in the USSR has made a new beginning. Might anarchism now fill the ideological vacuum left by the collapse of Marxism? Here, with commentaries from some of their West-European comrades, the new Russian anarchists speak for themselves about their ideas, and of how anarchy may bring a new order, based on freedom, to the chaos of the USSR. Edited and with an introduction by Philip Ruff.

Anarcho-Syndicalism

Rudolph Rocker

Rudolf Rockerb's classic survey of anarcho-syndicalism was written during the Spanish Civil War to explain to the wider reading public the ideology which inspired the social revolution in Spain. It remains unsurpassed as a general introduction to anarchist thought and an authoritative account of the early history of international anarchism by one of the movement's leading figures.

Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism

Rudolph Rocker

A new edition of this classic with extensive notes. Rudolph Rocker remains one of the most important figures in the history of anarchism, from his key role organizing against sweatshop labor in London in the 1900s to being the moving spirit behind the founding of the largest ever anarchist international--the IWMA IN 1921. In his later years he tried to chronicle the rise and fall of mass, organised anarchism in Europe. Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism is Rocker's abridged version of his major work Anarcho-Syndicalism and helps to explain where organised anarchism came from. This book's lessons are a must for anyone interested in where it's going.

The Slow Burning Fuse. Secret History of the British Anarchists

John Quail

Storm in my Heart. Memories from the Widow of Johann Most

Helene Minkin. Tom Goyens (ed) & Alisa Braun (trans)

Partner of one of the most infamous anarchists of her time, Johann Most, Helene Minkin joined the anarchist movement after emigrating from Russia in 1888 with her father and sister. Framed as a reaction and corrective to Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, Minkin’s memoir provides a unique account of turn-of-the-century anarchism and immigrant life in the United States. Published in the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts in 1932, this is its first English translation.

Taking Sides. Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

Cindy Milstein (ed)

The lines of oppression are already drawn. The only question is, Which side are you on in the struggle against the violence that is white supremacy and policing? Taking Sides supplies an ethical compass and militant map of the terrain, arguing not for reform of structurally brutal institutions but rather for their abolition. Its thirteen essays are sharp interventions that take particular aim at the role of nonprofits, “ally” politics, and “peace police” in demobilizing rebellions against hierarchical power. The authors offer tools to hone strategies and tactics of resistance, and hold out the promise of robust, tangible solidarity across racial and other lines, because in the battle for systemic transformation, there are no outside agitators.

The Anarchists in London 1935-55

Albert Meltzer

A Grand Cause. The Hunger Strike and the Deportation of Anarchists From Soviet Russia

Gregori Petrovich Maximoff

Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov (better known to western readers as G. P. Maximoff) was Secretary of Russia's Anarcho-Syndicalist Confederation and editor of Golos Truda (The Voice of Labour). He experienced at first hand the Bolshevik repression which crushed other revolutionaries and subordinated popular revolt to party dictatorship.This text comes from his indictment of the Bolshevik regime The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (1940). It has been footnoted by the Kate Sharpley Library to throw the light on the stories of other Russian anarchists as part of our Anarchists in the Gulag Project.Maksimov's years of exile were dedicated to anarchist activism and propaganda, criticising the Leninist counter-revolution and attempts to extend solidarity to anarchist prisoners in Russia. He died in 1953 and was buried in Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery.

The Method of Freedom. An Errico Malatesta Reader

Errico Malatesta. Davide Turcato (ed). Paul Sharkey (trans)

“Anarchy, in common with socialism, has as its basis, its point of departure, its essential environment, equality of conditions; its beacon is solidarity and freedom is its method.”—Errico Malatesta The most distinctive and universal anarchist principle is the principle of coherence between ends and means: human emancipation cannot be achieved by authoritarian means. However, the same principle could also be read in the opposite direction: our ends should not be disconnected from our action; our ideals should not be so lofty as to make no difference to what we do here and now. The anarchist whose deeds and words have best illustrated both sides of that principle—the “idealist” and the “pragmatist”—is Errico Malatesta. Never one to divorce thought from action, or retreat into dogmatism, his life and ideals remain an inspiration the world over. The Method of Freedom is the first collection to capture the full range of Malatesta’s thought over sixty years as an anarchist propagandist. The Method of Freedom collects Malatesta's most enduring long-form essays--including "Anarchy" and "Our Program"--together with previously untranslated articles from the numerous journals he edited over his long newspaper career. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the collected texts have been newly translated into English. Written in Malatesta's clear, accessible style, these essays are sure to excite a new generation of radicals.

Peter Kropotkin. Modern Science and Anarchy.

Peter Kropotkin. Iain McKay (ed)

Assembled in English for the first time, an unabridged gem from anarchism's famous theorist.

Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution

Peter Kropotkin

In one of his most influential works, Kropotkin challenges classical Darwinism, arguing that in nature, co-operation is as important as competition.

The Conquest of Bread

Peter Kropotkin

A brilliant blueprint for a free society by one of anarchism's most famous theorists. The Conquest of Bread is Peter Kropotkin's most extensive study of human needs and his outline of the most rational and equitable means of satisfying them. The most important and widely read exposition of anarchist economic theory, its combination of detailed historical analysis and far-reaching utopian vision is a step-by-step guide to social revolution: the concrete means of achieving it and the new world that humanity is capable of creating. Writing in a way that he describes as "moderate in style, but revolutionary in substance," Kropotkin adeptly translates complex ideas into common language, while rendering the often-amorphous aspirations of social movements into coherent form. Includes an introduction that historically situates and discusses the contemporary relevance of Kropotkin's ideas. The Working Classics Series revives lineages of radical thought from the history of the anarchist movement.

Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay 1956-76

Troy Andreas Ariaza Kokinis

A Cold War-era study of Latin American anarchism in action. Araiza Kokinis's study of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) broadens our understanding of the Cold War-era political landscape beyond the capitalism-communism and Old Left-New Left binaries that dominate the historiography of the epoch. Arguably the most impactful anarchist organization globally in the Cold War era, the FAU viewed everyday people as revolutionary protagonists and sought to develop a popular counter-subjectivity through accumulating experiences directly challenging the market and the state. The FAU argued that everyday people transformed into revolutionary subjects through the regular practice of collective direct action in labor unions, student organizations, and neighborhood councils. Their slogan was "create popular power," and their praxis differed from nationalist strains of Marxism at the time. The strategies and tactics promoted by FAU, ones in which everyday people took on roles as historical protagonists, offered the largest threat to maintaining social order in Uruguay and thus spawned a military takeover of the state to dismantle and deflate their vibrant popular revolt. With less than 80 militants, FAU played a key role both sparking and networking popular protagonism in workplaces, neighborhoods, and on campuses. The FAU worked in coalition with the Communist Party (PCU), MLN-Tupamaros (MLN-T), and other Left organizations to support a unified Left project while simultaneously challenging hegemonic strategies, tactics, and discourses. Unlike other anarchist groups worldwide, which took to individualism and counterculture in response to Marxism's popularity throughout the sixties, the FAU embraced Third Worldism and a class struggle strategy that made them a relevant force amongst popular social movements. Throughout the constitutional dictatorship (1967-73), the Tendencia Combativa, a coalition of dissident labor unions spearheaded by FAU, controlled one-third of the nation's unions in some of the most lucrative industries, especially in the private sector. By the time of June 27, 1973, military coup, a majority of Uruguayan industrialists recognized organized labor as the most serious threat to national security. Moreover, communications between US Ambassador to Uruguay Ernest V. Siracusa and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, showed the dictatorship's primary concern was to repress the surging labor movement rather than confronting a waning Tupamaro guerrilla movement. The FAU's anarchist activism within this broader climate of worker revolt threw a wrench in the 1970s neoliberal experiments in Latin America that later migrated north to impoverish American workers from the 1980s until today.

Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy. Essays on Colin Ward

Andrew Kelly (ed)

Change the World Without Taking Power

John Holloway

Beautiful edition of Marx and Engels' classic manifesto, introduced by renowned social theorist David Harvey.

As If Already Free. Anthropology and Activism After David Graeber.

Holly High & Joshua O. Reno (eds)

'A highly original thinker' - New York Times David Graeber (1961-2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist, who left us with new ways to understand humankind. This collection of new writing brings together his insights into one book, showing how deeply his work continues to influence us today. Graeber's writing resonates with both scholars and activists looking to shake things up. The impact of his work is broad in scope, from birth to banking, and he picks open social hierarchy and political power to expose what really makes human society tick. In today's neoliberal world, we can turn to his legacy to provide a way for us to understand what went wrong, and how to fix it. This collection of writings by colleagues and friends is both an introduction to his life and works, a guide to his key ideas, and an inspiring example of of how anthropologists are continuing to use his work today.

The Idea. Anarchist Communism: Past, Present and Future.

Nick Heath

Insurrection: The Bloody Events of May 1937

Agustin Guillamón

How revolutionary "leaders" and govenment officials conspired to stop a revolution in Spain.

The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937-1939

Agustin Guillamón

"Revolutions without theory fail to make progress. We of the 'Friends Of Durruti' have outlined our thinking, which may be amended as appropriate in great social upheavals but which hinges upon two essential points which cannot be avoided. A program, and rifles."--El Amigo del Pueblo, No. 5, July 20, 1937. Spain 1936-1939: This is the story of a group of anarchists engaged in the most thoroughgoing social and economic revolution of all time. Essentially street fighters with a long pedigree of militant action, they used their own experiences to arrive at the finest contemporary analysis of the Spanish Revolution. In doing so, they laid down essential markers for all future revolutionaries. This study--drawing on interviews with participants and synthesizing archival information--is THE definitive text on these unsung activists. This volume is translated, edited, and introduced by Paul Sharkey, acknowledged internationally as the foremost expert on the Friends Of Durruti Group.

Anarchism: From Theory to Practice

Daniel Guerin

The author examines both the theory of anarchism and its practice and influence through the Bolshevik Revolution era, the Spanish Civil War, the Italian factory councils, and its role in workers' self-management in Yugoslavia and Algeria.