Abstract: Anarchism has undergone a broad renewal in the US and Canada in recent decades, flowering most spectacularly in the alter-globalization movement in the years after the protests against the WTO ministerial in Seattle in November 1999. At the time, the movement seemed to outsiders to have spring out of nowhere.
Articles
Articles and publications
The Riot That Wasn’t
Hundreds of masked, black-clad anarchists adopted Gandhian tactics of nonviolent resistance during the IMF/World Bank protests in Washington, joining with other protesters in forming human chains blockading intersections, singing songs, playing musical instruments and greeting lines of heavily armed riot police with chants of "everything we do, we do because we love you."
The Sadness of Post-workerism, or “Art & Immaterial Labour” Conference, a sort of review
On the 19th of January, several of the heavyweights of Italian post-Workerist theory — Toni Negri, Bifo Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Judith Revel — appeared at the Tate Modern to talk about art. This is a review.
The Shock of Victory
The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.
This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly vic- torious of late.
The sword the sponge and the paradox of performativity
This is an essay about what it means that humans live in history, in a situa- tion where the future cannot be known and the past cannot be changed and, therefore, where the unpredictable is constantly turning into the irreversible.
The truth is out: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it
Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn’t know how banking really works, because if they did, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.
The Twilight of Vanguardism
Revolutionary thinkers have been saying that the age of vanguardism is over for most of a century now. Outside of a handful of tiny sectarian groups, it’s almost impossible to find a radical intellectuals seriously believe that their role should be to determine the correct historical analysis of the world situation, so as to lead the masses along in the one true revolutionary direction.
THE VERY IDEA OF CONSUMPTION: desire, phantasms, and the aesthetics of destruction in Western society
One of the nice things—if sometimes also one of the more irritating things—about anthro- pology is that it is uniquely well positioned to puncture theoretical assumptions. What I would like to do in this essay is to investigate one such assumption, or rather, set of assump- tions: ones which have, in a way, become some of the philosophical underpinnings of our cur- rent civilization.
There Never Was a West Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between
From the collection "Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire" by AK Press
Theres no need for all this economic sadomasochism
The intellectual justification for austerity lies in ruins. It turns out that Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, who originally framed the argument that too high a “debt-to- GDP ratio” will always, necessarily, lead to economic contraction – and who had aggressively promoted it during Rogoff’s tenure as chief economist for the IMF –, had based their entire argu- ment on a spreadshe
Theresa May recites Labour’s lines, butdoesn’t mean a word of them
Everyone already knows how much of Theresa May’s platform, policies and even rhetoric are directly stolen from Ukip. Nigel Farage himself publicly pointed it out this Sunday: not only had May taken Ukip’s major policy issues (immigration, grammar schools, bashing EU bureaucrats), he said, “She is using exactly the same words and phrases that I have been using for 20 years.
To Have Is to Owe
For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seiz- ing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors’ children into slavery.