Seth Farber, author of “The Spiritual Gift of Madness.”

“The Spiritual Gift of Madness,” outside the lively interviews, is a stiff, terribly dogmatic and one-sided polemic in which Farber concedes nothing of value to any who disagree with his central thesis that the hallucinations and delusions of mental illness are anything but the Voice of God communicating with humanity.

Was ACT-UP an early example of “anarchist organizing”?

“Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis and Movement Building Strategy,” may be the “Rules for Radicals” for a growing trend of anarcho-practicos who up until this point have had little literature to make their case with.

By James Tracy

Chris Crass is an anarchist organizer. For those whose perception of anarchism begins and ends with broken windows, this may seem like an oxymoron. The tradition has a tortured relationship with organizing. Anarchism’s fingerprints can be found on many of the important social movements since the late 1980s; ranging from the AIDS activism of ACT-UP to the anti-nuclear and Global Justice Movements. Other currents within the anarchist tradition hold organizing leads to hierarchy, compromise and cooptation. The anti-organizing voice of anarchism is at its most articulate in recent tracts such as “The Coming Insurrection” and a wealth of books and manifestos from the Crimethinc collective.

Crass walks anarchism down a very different road. His anarchism, and that of the political organizations he helped build, isn’t afraid of community organizing. It also isn’t afraid to reach across the radical aisle and work with marxists, feminists, liberals and just about any other category that makes it to the meeting. His new book, “Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy” may be the “Rules for Radicals” for a growing trend of anarcho-practicos who up until this point have had little literature to make their case with. (In 1993, Tom Knoche formulated a case for anarchist participation in reform organizing, see Organizing Communities in the journal Social Anarchism.)

“Towards Collective Liberation” is an impressive contribution to radical thought. Crass outlines a vision of anarchism rooted deeply in the anti-racist tradition, and influenced by feminism.

He’s most at home when teasing out the lessons of his own politicization. The exploration of Food Not Bombs (FNB) is a delightful surprise—combining a sober assessment of the movement’s weaknesses with a nuanced description of their accomplishments under fire during San Francisco’s War For Space. Here, he carefully avoids demonizing FNB personalities who made destructive mistakes, but pulls no punches in the final analysis. He sets a high bar for constructive discourse without stooping to polemics.

His ability to grapple with the complexities of the Civil Rights Movement and draw implications for anti-authoritarians is unique. Instead of approaching social movements in terms of all-or-nothing reductionism Crass identifies ways for radical organizers to engage with them and think outside the Infoshop.

The book isn’t without some key weaknesses. In some essays, Crass’ over-reliance on jargon obscures his otherwise salient power of observation. He raises important points, “we need a revitalized, dynamic, and visionary Left politics that draws from many traditions, not just anarchism, but also Marxism, feminism, revolutionary nationalism and others;” then only scratches the surface of the mechanics of doing so.

Other themes left under-examined are the strengths and weaknesses of the interventions his organization, the Catalyst Project made in the name of racial justice in key moments such as the response to hurricane Katrina and the immigrant rights upsurge. I find it odd that the process of committed anarchists traveling to other cities in order to challenge “white supremacy” in the movement didn’t yield deeper reflection. What were the moments when this strategy bolstered local organizing? When was it unwelcome by locals? Did it ever feel a bit vanguardist, and if so, what was to be done?

Thankfully, Crass’ has a political vision of anti-racism, separated from individualistic notions of white guilt and “invisible back packs.” He recognizes white supremacy as a system and a historic roadblock to social transformation. While centering race and colonization, he also avoids reducing race to the only dilemma facing organizers today. In this sense, he snatches anti-racism from the jaws of the professional diversity trainers polluting today’s discourse.

Taken as a whole, the book makes the case for an anarchist practice relevant to, and a part of, the lives of everyday people, and the larger Left. With humility and optimism, Crass offers critical insights hard won through a life on the frontlines. “Towards Collective Liberation” is an important read, not just for anarchists, but anyone pondering the road forward.

James Tracy is a native of Oakland, California and a long-time economic justice organizer. He is the co-author of “Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times” (Melville House).

The paperback edition of “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” .. hit No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list yesterday, and the hardcover edition, published in 2003, climbed as high as No. 6….Demand for the book seemed to be spread across the country. In Florida, Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, an independent bookseller with locations in Miami Beach, Coral Gables and Bal Harbour, said he had already ordered 50 more copies of “Hegemony,” while he usually keeps only about 3 per store. In Denver, Andrea Phillips, a manager at the Colfax Avenue branch of the bookseller the Tattered Cover, said “Hegemony” had sold three times as many copies this week as it normally would in a month.

As someone who follows these things, I have never seen “viral” support for a title on Facebook or Twitter or the left media have a comparable impact. I draw two conclusions. Sometimes having someone possessing state power on your side helps things. And a lot of Americans are hungry for alternative ideas,and are not being reached through the channels the left is most comfortable with.

Howard Zinn (image: Creative Commons).

While I think that people can learn about Howard Zinn in Martin Duberman’s book, “Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left,” “A Peoples’ History of the United States” and Howard’s memoir-like book, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times,” would be higher on my list.

by Alan Weider

Howard Zinn was 87 when he died in 2010.  He was an activist, writer, and teacher and these three aspects of his life interacted seamlessly as he fought for social justice in the United States. Martin Duberman has written a biography of Zinn, “Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left.” Duberman, like Zinn, is an activist, writer, and teacher – he speaks to the two men’s similarities in his introduction:

We held common convictions on a wide range of public issues. Our views coincided about the justice of the black struggle and the injustice of the war in Vietnam. We deplored the entrenched and usually unacknowledged class divisions in this country, the growing monopoly of wealth in the hands of a few, and the arrogance and destruction of US foreign policy.

“Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left” by Martin Duberman is a chronological portrait of Zinn’s life. As I read the book I couldn’t shake something I learned in an early historiography class:

Beware of biographical caveats

In the introduction, besides writing of the correspondence of his and Zinn’s views of the world, Duberman notes that Zinn shredded his personal papers making it difficult to combine the political and personal in his portrayal of  Zinn’s life. In a February 2010 reading on my radio program after Zinn died, Ole Mole Variety Hour’s Tom Becker explained that for Zinn, the political was personal and the personal was political. Unfortunately, in the biography, that is told but not shown.

Duberman, now 82 years old, has published numerous books, articles, and plays including “Paul Robeson: A Biography.” He is most well known for his activism and eight books on LGBT rights. He has received numerous awards and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Martin Duberman’s accomplishments and the accolades for his work are exceptional. Yet, “Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left” is a disappointing book. It is disappointing not because Zinn didn’t leave personal papers, but rather because Martin Duberman used neither Zinn’s voice nor those of his family, comrades, colleagues, friends and critics. We do not get a good sense of the depth or breadth of Howard Zinn.  Duberman acknowledges doing ten interviews – five with family and five with friends. There were probably more but there are almost no quotes as Duberman tells, rather than shows, Zinn’s life.

So while there are some insights, usually from books by Zinn that many of us have read, there are pages and pages of what might be generously called context that do not connect directly to Zinn’s life.

Writing on Zinn’s early life, there is a great paragraph, the gist of which was  in Zinn’s “The Southern Mystique,” where Zinn confronts racism while in the military. In the biography, the event, however, is situated within pages of context that do little to portray Howard Zinn.

It is the same for the next 100 pages that cover Zinn’s first academic appointment at Spellman College and the Civil Rights Movement. The Spellman chapter covers Zinn helping to politicize students but it is too often a list of events – some about Zinn, some about the college, and some about the South and racism without showing Zinn as a human participant.

There are snippets, however. Amidst the Spellman chapter Howard’s thinking on Malcolm X, black power, and SNCC do come alive as do some sit-in stories in the chapter on the Civil Rights Movement. Pages and pages are devoted to Zinn’s firing, and President Manley of Spellman’s accusations of sexual misconduct will hit the novice reader quite hard. That of course raises numerous questions about biographical methodology that are beyond the scope of this short review.

We are teased by mention of Zinns’s interactions with James Baldwin and Ella Baker and his work on The Freedom Summer – but I for one found myself asking for more – give it life.

Duberman writes on the Viet Nam War and Zinn’s 1967 book “Vietnam the Logic of Withdrawal.” We learn about Zinn’s critique of the war and he is humanized with a strong quote from his daughter Myla. We learn of his trips to Hanoi and Paris and his comrades David Dellinger, Daniel Berrigan, and Daniel Ellsberg, but again, I was yearning to know more of the relationships between the people as well as their relationships within the context of their collective missions.

There is a chapter called “Writing History” that speaks to Zinn within his academic discipline and includes some of his battles with historians like Eugene Genovese.  Much of the chapter, actually too much, includes Duberman’s analysis of Zinn’s scholarship – I kept writing ‘no life’ in the margins.

Also covered is Zinn’s ongoing battle with Boston University’s president, John Silber and the writing of Zinn’s most famous book, “A People’s History of the United States.” Duberman tells the well-known story about sales of the book surging after Matt Damon mentioned it in his film “Good Will Hunting,” and then again when it was shown on the HBO series, “The Sopranos.”

“Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left” actually comes more to life in its portrayal of the last three decades of Howard’s life. One hunch is that Duberman had great conversations with Anthony Arnove who Howard worked with closely late in his life?  Martin Duberman lauds “A People’s History” as well as earlier books and honors the many progressive projects that Howard Zinn’s work has launched – (for example the Zinn Education Project). He concludes by saying:

What will most certainly come down to future generations is Howard’s humanity, his exemplary concern for the plight of others, a concern free of condescension or self-importance. Howard always stayed in character – and that character remained centered on a capacious solidarity with the least fortunate.

While I think that people can learn about Howard Zinn in Martin Duberman’s book, “Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left,” “A Peoples’ History of the United States” and Howard’s memoir-like book, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times,” would be higher on my list.

Alan Wieder is an oral historian who taught for over 20 years at the University of South Carolina.  His forthcoming book, “Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid,” will be published in June by Monthly Review Books in the U.S. and Jacana Publishers in South Africa.  He writes at streetpixxwords.blogspot.com.

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” by Paul Gauguin (image: creative commons)

In just a few pages I felt the brotherly embrace of a comrade-in-arms, a soul-mate, and a companion; further along his fierce intelligence and original insights challenged me to make new connections; by the end I was inspired to re-imagine next steps in my own efforts at movement-making.

by Bill Ayers

Dada Maheshvarananda is a monk and a social activist, an engaged intellectual and a writer whose powerful new book, “After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action“, provides a comprehensive critique of the economic system that grips the planet and suffocates our lives, names the contemporary political moment we’re facing with astonishing clarity, and illustrates with concrete cases and specific examples the practical steps needed to build a radical movement toward joy and justice, peace and love, sanity and balance. It’s a broad and ambitious book to be sure. In just a few pages I felt the brotherly embrace of a comrade-in-arms, a soul-mate, and a companion; further along his fierce intelligence and original insights challenged me to make new connections; by the end I was inspired to re-imagine next steps in my own efforts at movement-making. This is an essential book created by a gentle warrior.

The questions that animate Dada Maheshvarananda’s work are the same ones I saw recently scrawled across a sprawling panorama created by the tormented painter Paul Gauguin—in 1897, after months of illness and suicidal despair, Gauguin produced on a huge piece of jute sacking an image of unfathomable figures amid scenery that might have been the twisted groves of a tropical island or a marvelously wild Garden of Eden; worshippers and gods; cats, birds, a quiet goat; a great idol with a peaceful expression and uplifted hands; a central figure plucking fruit; a depiction of Eve not as a voluptuous innocent like some other women in Gauguin’s work but as a shrunken hag with an intense eye.

Gauguin wrote the title of the work in bold on top of the image; translated into English it reads:

Where do we come from?

What are we?

Where are we going?

These are questions—horrifying for Gauguin, inspiring for Dada Maheshvarananda—that rumble in the background on every page of “After Capitalism.” How can we see ourselves and our problems/challenges/potentials holistically? How can we connect our personal and spiritual seeking with the practical search for a better world for all? How can we live with one foot in the mud and muck of the world as it is while the other foot stretches toward a world that could be but is not yet? How can we transform ourselves to be worthy of the profound social transformations we desire and need? And how can we build within ourselves the thoughtfulness, compassion, and courage to dive into the wreckage on a mission of repair?

We begin by opening our eyes:

Look! says the pilgrim.

I can’t look…

Look at it! Open your eyes for once, for God’s sake, have the courage to at least look, will you?

I can’t look…I’m going to be sick…

You mean you won’t look, don’t you? You can look, but you won’t. It might upset you, it might mess your outfit—or it might ruin your whole day. You refuse to look. Admit that at the very least.

I won’t…I can’t…What’s the difference?

The difference is this: willful blindness is a form of cowardice and indifference, and the opposite of moral is not immoral; the opposite of moral is indifferent.

Wide awake it’s clear that planet earth has enough resources to meet everyone’s basic needs if we share; on the other hand if we hoard we are in for famine, pestilence, war, and mayhem. It’s equally clear that both tendencies live deep within every human being: selfishness and selflessness, me and we, individualism and collectivity. The question at the heart of this book is this: Where do we go from here, socialism or barbarism, chaos or community?

The practical and theoretical work of Dada Maheshvarananda and his comrades is the fight for economic justice, and on the side of sharing. One of the great deceptions of our time is the sham that meaningful political democracy is possible in the absence of economic democracy. “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice,” wrote Mikhail Bakunin (adding that “socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality”) and it is self-evidently so: there can be no real freedom where huge differences in wealth and access make any voluntary exchange or contract little more than legal larceny and authorized plunder. The traffic in human beings, modern-day slavery, the market for body parts, international adoption—all bear the mark of privilege, exploitation, global injustice, and structural violence. And so do the sanitized schemes of the bankers, the financial wizards, and the ruling class generally.

Economic democracy requires popular control, wide participation, and decentralized decision-making, and it insists that the minimum requirements of life must be guaranteed—food, housing, clothing, education, and health-care. Life is the birthright that transcends borders, and the most straight-forward gauge of the degree of justice available in any society is how power responds to that basic right.

Our struggle is for more participation, more equality, more recognition of human agency, and more transparency as we lean toward revolution. We must rouse ourselves, shake ourselves awake and perhaps shock ourselves into new awarenesses.

But it’s often hard to look, and obstacles spring up everywhere: when we feel ourselves shackled, bound, and gagged or when we are badly beaten down, struggling just to survive, living with dust in our mouths, the horizons of our hope can become lowered, sometimes fatally, and our eyes, then, dim. What kind of world do we want to inhabit? When no alternatives are apparent or available, action becomes pointless. When privilege obstructs our vision it acts as an anesthetic, putting us to sleep; we must then call upon the aesthetic—the world of the imagination—to combat the numbing power of the sedative.

We all live in our time and place, immersed in what is, and imagining a social scene different from what’s immediately before us requires a combination of somethings: seeds, surely; desire, yes; necessity and desperation at times; and, at other times a willingness to dance out on a limb without a safety net—no guarantees.

Imagination is essential, more process than product, more “stance” than “thing,” imagination involves the dynamic work of mapping the world as such, and then leaning toward a world that might be but is not yet. Most of us most of the time accept our lot-in-life as inevitable—for decades, generations, even centuries; when a revolution is in reach, when a lovelier life heaves into view, or when a possible world becomes somehow visible, the status quo becomes suddenly unendurable. We then reject the fixed and the stable, and begin to look at the world as if it could be otherwise, and we begin the important work of reweaving our shared world.

Choice and confidence is a necessary politics. I don’t want to minimize the horror, but neither do I want to get stuck in its thrall. Hope is an antidote to cynicism and despair; it is the capacity to notice or invent alternatives; it is nourishing the sense that standing directly against the world as such is a world that could be, or should be. Without that vital sense of possible worlds, doors close, curtains drop, and we become stranded: we cannot adequately oppose injustice; we cannot act freely; we cannot inhabit the most vigorous moral spaces. We are never freer, all of us and each of us, than when we refuse the situation before us as settled and certain and determined and break the chains that entangle us.

The tools are everywhere—humor and art, protest and spectacle, the quiet, patient intervention and the angry and urgent thrust—and the rhythm of and recipe for activism is always the same: we open our eyes and look unblinkingly at the world as we find it; we are astonished by the beauty and horrified at the suffering all around us; we act on what the known demands and we also doubt that our efforts made enough difference, and so we rethink, recalibrate, look again, and dive in once more. If we never doubt we get lost in self-righteousness and political narcissism—been there—but if we only doubt we vanish into cynicism and despair. Awake/Act/Doubt! Repeat! Repeat! Repeat for a lifetime.

Revolution is still possible, democracy and socialism, possible, but barbarism is possible as well. Our expansive and expanding dreams are not realized, of course, not yet, but neither are they dimmed or diminished. Every revolution is, after all, impossible before it happens; afterwards it feels inevitable.

W.H. Auden provides another: We must love one another or die.

Bill Ayers is the author of several books on education, as well as a memoir, “Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist,” and the forthcoming “Public Enemy: Memoirs of Dissident Days.”

A sign at a rally during the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike.

2012 was the year that the class-oriented political rhetoric introduced by Occupy Wall Street (OWS) percolated throughout American society, affecting both the election and social struggles. This was so even as Occupy itself was in a downward spiral for much of the year.

Although the Occupy encampments had mostly been repressed by the beginning of December 2011, hopes for the movement remained high into the new year. In March, at the Left Forum in New York City, Michael Moore laid out an ambitious vision of Occupy expanding to every neighborhood in the United States. It seemed reasonable enough. But a hint of the real limits of the movement came later that night. After his speech, Moore led Left Forum participants on a march to Zucotti Park, home of OWS, just a couple blocks away. It was the six month anniversary of the movement. The mood was festive and relaxed. Some people hung around past the midnight, the official closing time of the park. Immediately the cops swarmed in, aggressively attacking demonstrators, as they had repeatedly in the past at any sign that the encampment might restart. And as had been the case in the past, notwithstanding the considerable good will harbored towards the movement by many in NYC, no organized force such as the unions or nonprofits mobilized to directly challenge the repression. The sole exception, as far as I know, was the Maoist political group, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP, however, is incapable of mobilizing people beyond its small membership.

The remnants of OWS  increasingly seemed to take a confrontational approach towards the police that further isolated them from the broad penumbra of support that had earlier helped catapult OWS to global fame. May Day protests in some places, including NYC, brought back memories of the glory days, but the momentum was not sustained. The same can be said about the protests against NATO in Chicago. Hard to believe, in retrospect, that some observers were fearful of a replay of 1968 in Chicago, when antagonism between protesters and cops overshadowed the Democratic convention. The NATO protests, while not unimpressive, hardly registered in the American public debate.

Instead new struggles came to define 2012, all profoundly marked by the spirit of rebellion so apparent during the heyday of Occupy. Some people predicted that more traditional social justice organizations would pick up the ball that OWS was fumbling. A coalition of such groups, “the 99% spring,” including many important unions and non-profits,  was soon rolled out, with plans to train thousands in nonviolent direct action tactics. A vigorous debate ensued about whether this constituted co-optation of OWS or the taking of the movement to a higher level. This debate quickly subsided when the wan impact of the 99% spring became clear. A few protests were held at board meetings of major corporations and such. Little happened beyond that. The 99% spring renamed itself “99% power.” At this writing, the 99% power website does not appear to have been updated since May 31, suggesting that the concept has been quietly abandoned.

About the same time, the presidential election began to move to the fore in earnest, sucking a certain amount of energy away from the streets. Whereas in 2008 Barack Obama had tapped into deep wellsprings of hope and anger, in 2012 the mood on the left was glum. The Republican primary season offered a march of idiots, before Mitt Romney was able to overwhelm the field with money. Obama himself was something of a no-show for his reelection campaign. His most memorable moment was the first debate, when his bored and disconnected manner offered an opening for Romney. It was instead Bill Clinton, at the convention, and Joe Biden, during the vice presidential debate, who offered rousing defenses of centrist communitarianism that energized the liberal base. Much of the left, fed up with four years of drone strikes, negotiated cave-ins, deterioriation of civil liberties, and other disappointments too numerous to mention, heaped venom on the whole spectacle. Those of us who suggested voting for Obama as the lesser of two evils found ourselves on the defensive as appeals to vote third party or skip voting altogether seemed more popular, particularly among younger people on the left.

And yet, the election did not feel entirely meaningless after all. One important hint was Mitt Romney’s notorious 47% speech, where he framed the electoral contest as one between the wealthier half of the country, which pays federal income tax, and the bottom half, which mostly does not, and, in his view, is excessively dependent on government programs, notwithstanding that any serious accounting of government spending finds the top 53% receive more concrete benefits than the bottom half. A similar hint was offered in a column by Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who encountered a “startling vehemence” in opposition to Obama among businessmen of Cleveland and Chicago. Exit polls indicated that the election did in fact have a strong class basis. Obama won a large majority of those voters in households making $50,000 or less, and lost all other economic brackets, although the Democrats are also popular with people with advanced degrees, an important affluent sector. Racial minorities, Blacks and Latinos but also Asians, who historically have a much weaker connection to the Democratic Party, voted for Obama in large numbers. Notwithstanding its racist overtones, Bill O’Reilly captured something of the implications of the election results in his notorious statement: “It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it. And he ran on it.” Where O’Reilly is wrong is in his belief that Obama is going to deliver many of the “things” these voters want, such as jobs or affordable health care. Obama instead almost immediately began devising cuts to social security as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations. Nevertheless, the right probably should view the emergent class-based, minority-friendly electoral  majority with alarm. Never in recent history have appeals based on racial scaremongering and social issues seemed so impotent. Already, the electoral debacle has thrown Republican obstructionism on immigration reform into question.

Meanwhile, the various calls to vote third party or boycott the vote made little obvious impact. Jill Stein of the Green Party, the most prominent left third party candidate, barely surpassed a tenth of Ralph Nader’s vote share from 2000, straggling in with .3%. Voter turnout was low, but this appeared to have more to do with disillusionment with the elections during a stagnant economy than any calls for a boycott. Furthermore, large numbers of Blacks and Latinos, who, one hopes, the left would like to see in its coalitions, made the effort to vote in defiance of voter suppression tactics promoted by Republicans at the state level. The most notable electoral strategy of the left outside of the Democratic Party was not at the national level but in a Seattle District for a Washington State Senate seat. There, economics professor Kshama Sawant, running as a socialist, lost with an impressive 27% of the vote. Third party advocates may want to consider zeroing in on vulnerable local races as places to begin to build power and insert alternate discourses into American life.

Although, as indicated above, the presidential election drew some of the mental energy of the left and its sympathizers, and Occupy mostly was in decline, new fronts of struggle opened up. Perhaps the most important of these developments was the upsurge in strike activity, somewhat anticipated by us last year. Most notable of these was the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) strike in September, and the strikes of Walmart workers, both in stores and on the supply chain, mostly during the fall. Both of these have immense implications, far beyond the number of workers involved, which, in the case of Walmart, was fairly modest. Schools have been the central terrain of attacks on the public sphere, and the last thirty years, if not longer, have been characterized by efforts to set racial minorities against teachers’ unions. Yet the CTU, under the new leadership of Karen Lewis (itself the product of an activist reform caucus), was able to rally a large majority of Black and Latino families to its cause. It will take many more strikes and related activities to reverse the ugly trajectory of charter schools, standardized testing mania, and the degradation of the teaching profession, but this was an important start. Inspired by the CTU, reform caucuses in teachers’ unions throughout the country are stepping up their activity.

Over the long term, the Walmart strikes may be even more significant. Walmart is pretty much the largest employer in the U.S., and it has effectively immunized itself against previous union campaigns. But the new wave of strike activity has thrown it on the defensive. Strikes at warehouses and ports demonstrated the vulnerabilities that “just-in-time” production creates. A national day of action on Black Friday saw widespread participation by Occupy groups and other community supporters.  Not long after, hundreds of fast food workers in New York City struck, opening another front in a sector that was seemingly off limits to unions as of last year. These campaigns were organized by unions, by community groups with close ties to unions, and by workers acting spontaneously. But the context for the growing audacity was the Occupy earthquake last year. More than at any time in decades, strike activity is involving workers not formally members of unions. This burst of energy was not confined to the CTU or Walmart and other retail workers. There was also the Hot and Crusty struggle, the Palermo’s Pizza boycott, strikes at ports, and more.

At the same time, the unions have not crafted an effective strategy against the Republican drive to push through right-to-work and anti-collective bargaining legislation at the state level. At the beginning of the year, a rousing effort by unions in Indiana to “Occupy the Superbowl” was scaled back as the leadership got cold feet. In the summer, the failure of the recall vote of Scott Walker marked an ignominious turn in the Wisconsin struggle. At the end of the year, Michigan demonstrated that the unions and their allies have still not crafted an effective response to “surprise” attacks by Republican legislators. An increasingly stark choice is taking shape–either unions will have to develop some more effective strategy to challenge these attacks, or workers will struggle under a context in which U.S. labor law has been further defanged. It is hard to see how such a strategy can be crafted without getting at least a little space from their supposed allies in the Democratic Party, even as the logic of the Republicans’ attacks is pushing the unions even further into the hands of the Democrats.

Class-based struggles of the thirties were accompanied by a revival in struggles against racism, eventually leading to the modern civil rights movement. Similarly, today we are seeing a renewal of these struggles, now often targeting issues of criminal justice and referencing the concept of “the New Jim Crow.” This years’ protests around the murder of Trayvon Martin marked an escalation from last years’ around the unjust execution of Troy Davis. In the summer, civil rights groups with the support of some unions held a “silent march” (apparently an effort to marginalize the unruly Occupy element) against the stop-and-frisk tactics of the New York Police. Numerous events were held around the country in which the families of the victims of police violence spoke up. In the poorest neighborhoods, something more radical is afoot. Those most victimized by such policies as stop-and-frisk and mass incarceration are also a large portion of fast food workers, suggesting the sorts of alliances that might open up as these struggles intensify.

Challenging housing evictions was on the agenda of OWS pretty much from the start. But this year, the struggle became more concrete. Struggles like that around the Cruz family in Minneapolis and  the Hernandez family in Los Angeles inspired activists nationwide. An Occupy Our Homes day of action in December took things to a higher level, but not quite to a level where the media or politicians paid much attention. Expect these struggles to continue to grow over the next year or two.

Finally, a little after the one year anniversary of Occupy, OWS showed new signs of life, in two forms–the Rolling Jubilee #Strikedebt movement, and Occupy Sandy. The Rolling Jubilee, which purchases personal debt in secondary markets and retires it, has been subject to withering critique in some quarters of the left. One of the major criticisms, that it involves so little money that its effects are largely symbolic, strikes me as misguided. The two greatest direct action campaigns in the history of the U.S.–defiance of the fugitive slave act by abolitionists, and draft resistance during the sixties–were also largely symbolic. For the most part, the fugitive slave act was still enforced, and the military never lost the capacity to restock the forces in Vietnam.  Nevertheless, both of these movements greatly intensified debate and sharpened positions. Resistance to debt at a symbolic level, rather than people actually defaulting en masse, is what is likely to shift the debate at this point. A bigger question is whether Rolling Jubilee will be that mechanism. Much of the debt being purchased, at prices set by the banks, is fraudulent. Is it just legitimizing this fraud-ridden secondary market? Furthermore, it is not clear what the next step proposed by the Strike Debt group is, apart from vague calls to continue to resist debt. Still, if this activity does gain some ballast, it will not be the first time in recent memory in the U.S. that an action tarred by the far left as insufficiently radical actually made an impact. Similar critiques were popular as Occupy Wall Street was beginning.

The other initiative that thrust Occupy back into the spotlight was Occupy Sandy, the response to the “Frankenstorm” that hit New Jersey and New York hard.  Racing into the breach formed by a failed state response to a “natural” disaster has a long and honorable pedigree among movements, as those familiar with the history of Mexico and Nicaragua know.  The immense volunteer efforts associated with Occupy Sandy were simultaneously a depoliticized campaign which built good will for the movement and highlighted the ineffectiveness of the government response and positioning for the more explicitly political struggles ahead regarding rebuilding and construction of needed infrastructure.

This year saw mounting struggles in workplaces, in neighborhoods, against “the New Jim Crow,” around storm relief. An electoral contest between two neoliberals nevertheless produced a result with obvious class overtones. We have not even given due consideration to the reemergence of protests around reproductive rights, at this point mostly focused on the venality and stupidity of various Republican legislative acts at the state level. In fact, the prominence of women in most of the major labor struggles of 2012, as well as the eviction movement, Occupy Sandy, and the post-Newtown revival of calls for gun control,  is worth reflecting on. By contrast, in its heyday, Occupy struck many observers as male-dominated. Over the next few years, these struggles are likely to ascend to more intense levels. The question of how to pull them together into a coherent political project will require serious thinking and work.

Much more than a symbol, anarchism has become the focus of a great deal of activism and theorizing (image: Linurexist, Wikipedia Commons).

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“The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics” develops both the anarchist critique of capitalism and the project of an anarchist society.”

by George Fish

Political economy is the name originally given to economics during its early days of development under the classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and its enfant terrible, Karl Marx. But I want to use it in a different, a “new,” sense here, as the intersection of politics and economics; because, while economics itself has become a highly technical field, it is more often politics that informs economic policy and practice—that is, just what is done to create jobs, promote equality, produce goods and services that benefit all, and basically provide for the material benefit of society. Further, while much of economics, or classical political economy for that matter, is implicitly or explicitly pro-capitalist, significant objections to capitalism have been raised through the economic analysis of capitalism itself, as well as through the positing of an alternative political order to capitalism—chiefly, of course, by the left. Both historically, and in the present, the left divides broadly on the alternative polity to capitalism into two main camps: socialism and anarchism.

“The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics” develops both the anarchist critique of capitalism and the project of an anarchist society and its achievement through nineteen essays written by anarchist scholar/activists, not all of them professional academics. This scholarly activism is exemplified in the biographies of the three editors themselves, Deric Shannon, Anthony J. Nocella II and John Asimakopoulos. Appropriately for the discussion of “new” political economy and economic analysis as seen through anarchist eyes, “The Accumulation of Freedom” is subtitled “Writings on Anarchist Economics.”

Anarchist critiques of both capitalism and socialism have taken on an active new life in recent years on the left, and anarchist movements are now an integral part of it. The anarchist notion of direct participation in the restructuring of society, the notion of non-hierarchical social arrangements, and full democratic participation in all decision-processes have become integrally part of the world left theory and practice, often displacing previous left attraction to socialism and Marxism-Leninism. Anarchism and anarchist movements have come prominently into play since the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, and are integrally involved in both the activism and the political theory of Occupy movements. The “Postscript” in “The Accumulation of Freedom” written by the three editors in November 2011, at the height of Occupy Wall Street, expresses both the indebtedness of anarchism to the Occupy notion, its cross-fertilization by Occupy, and posits directions within an anarchist perspective that build on and extend Occupy notions.

An important development concomitant with the rise of contemporary anarchism is the notion of effective socialist-anarchist alliances around issues of common concern, and friendly, if critical, dialogue between socialists and anarchists. Three contributions to this notion of positive socialist-anarchist alliance have been articulated by socialists who see commonality despite differences with anarchist activists. The first of these was Ursula McTaggart’s “Can We Build Socialist-Anarchist Alliances?” in the socialist bimonthly Against the Current . A more restrained, but equally positive, assessment of socialist-anarchist alliances was given by Marvin Mandell in his review article in New Politics , “Anarchism and Socialism.” Mandell ends his review by writing, “I think Marxists and Anarchists can learn from each other and, in fact, need each other.” George Fish also contributed to the positive discussion of socialist-anarchist alliances from a socialist perspective in his review of Noam Chomsky’s “Chomsky on Anarchism,” in New Politics , “Chomsky, Anarchism, and Socialism,” and has a review of “The Accumulation of Freedom” forthcoming in New Politics 54 (Winter 2013).

“The Accumulation of Freedom” reciprocates this socialist appreciation by several contributors borrowing much of their analyses and critiques of capitalism from socialist and Marxist sources and, in some cases, openly expressing appreciation for Marx and Marxist ideas themselves. This is sometimes quite hard to do for anarchists, as Marx was a foremost critic of anarchism and engaged in vigorous polemics with two of its leading proponents, Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Prudhon. Yet in many ways the socialist and anarchist critiques of capitalism dovetail, and few socialists would have quarrel with the extensive critiques of contemporary capitalism and its destructiveness laid out here. Further, these analytical essays, contained in Parts 2 and 3 of the book, are extensive, well documented, and well done, giving great elucidation and development to the topic. The only analytical essay in these sections I was disappointed with was Abbey Volcano and Deric Shannon’s “Capitalism in the 200os: Broad Strokes for Beginners,” which I found more descriptive than analytical, but perhaps that is why it is subtitled as it is—it is aimed at beginners to economic analysis of capitalism, not so much at veterans like me.

There are many essays that discuss the how-to-do-it aspect of anarchist social transformation, but they all share in common the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and cooperative, mutual aid and support approach that is an integral part of contemporary anarchism. Unlike many socialists, anarchists rely more on direct action and determined groups of people just doing it, from Occupy movements to workers taking over factories and running them themselves, as detailed in Marie Trigona’s “Occupy, Resist, Produce! Lessons from Latin America’s Occupied Factories.” Here anarchists differ in emphasis and tactics generally from socialists in that they are impatient with socialist efforts to gain control of state power and use the power of the state to transform capitalism and create the new socialist state order because, of course, anarchists oppose the very existence of the state itself. But they also believe that the people themselves can organize to provide for their needs and wants independently of, and without reliance on, the state and state power.

“The Accumulation of Freedom” also contains useful guides on tactics of resistance, protest and effective opposition. Chief among these is Robin Hahnel’s “The Economic Crisis and Libertarian Socialists,” based on a speech Hahnel gave in Greece to anti-austerity activists. Hahnel lays out a multi-point guide for political action to restructure the European economies such as Greece’s that have been devastated by neoliberalism, and articulates in this a program many a supposedly “tamer” socialist would heartily agree with. D.T. Cochrane and Jeff Monaghan’s “Fight to Win! Tools for Confronting Capital” draws lessons on tactics and strategy from anti-corporate struggles that have been found useful and effective in a number of cases, from opposing sweatshops to getting divestment from arms manufacturing to stopping destructive research on animals.

The “Introduction” by the editors, “Anarchist Economics: A Holistic View,” the “Preface” by Ruth Kinna, and the “Afterword” by Michael Albert, “Porous Borders of Anarchist Vision and Strategy” articulate points of convergence and divergence among anarchists themselves, and elucidate in detail that there is no more only one sole variety of anarchism than there is only one sole variety of socialism. These three essays are especially useful for beginners in anarchist thought, though they have much also to teach the veterans, and they teach positively to all across the board—anarchists, socialists, as well as to interested political science and economic specialists and students who are neither.

Nor are people of color, both in the US “internal colony” and the Third World, slighted; Ernesto Aguilar takes note of their struggles in “Call It an Uprising: People of Color and the Third World Organize against Capitalism,” emphasizing a positive intersection of race, class and resistance in sparking rebellion of the darker-skinned vast majority of the world’s oppressed against global capitalism. While insightful in many ways, I did find this essay burdened too much with rhetorical flourish when it seemed to need more in-depth analysis. Aguilar raises many an intriguing thought, but then drops it without further discussion.

But all this only demonstrates the extensiveness and diversity to anarchist thought. It certainly belies any notion of an anarchist “party line” or generic “one-size-fits-all” variety of anarchism. The essays are well chosen, expressive of a wide diversity of approaches, and interesting and exciting to read. I read ‘The Accumulation of Freedom” virtually nonstop; once I started, I simply could not put it down. “The Accumulation of Freedom” is an important contribution to the study of this “new” political economy defined at the beginning, and is a book to heartily recommend.

*****

George Fish is a veteran socialist writer and poet in Indianapolis, Indiana, who has contributed to many left and alternative publications. He has appeared in New Politics, In These Times and Socialism and Democracy, among many others. He has written on economics (in which he has a university degree), Marxism and socialism, mental health issues and pop music, also writes on Indiana and Indianapolis as a journalist for Examiner.com, and has a political blog, “Politically Incorrect Leftist.”

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The end of the world will arrive eventually, but leftists probably shouldn’t be betting on the arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse any time soon (image: Albrecht Durer, Apocalypse (public domain)).

Posited as an intervention of sorts, “Catastrophism” is seemingly aimed to create debate on the Left. … Its premise, that old radical ideas that destitution leads to revolution need reappraisal, deserves closer review.

By Ernesto Aguilar

With the presidential election upon us, the idea of withholding votes against Democrats has surfaced among slivers of the Left, as it does every four years. The lesser of two evils is still evil, it is asserted, and should not be supported at all, even if it means a harsher evil could take control. Yet distilling quite monumental differences on reproductive rights and scores of other matters into both Democrats and Republicans being monolithic and essentially the same is as important in some quarters as fidelity to that line.

The hard edge of such distinctions was crystallized in a recent kerfuffle in which the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) was blasted in an online forum for claims it wanted people to vote for Barack Obama. FRSO, a Marxist group whose lineage includes bygone Maoist and Stalinist formations, was the target of 2010 FBI raids for the group’s reputed support of Colombian guerrillas. Yet FRSO seemed to have its long and extensive rebel credentials called into question over a single line about voting and swing states in a 1,300-word statement. Bizarre purism? Perhaps, but it has its adherents, on both Left and Right.

The notion that the worse society gets for people (under a Mitt Romney presidency; amid the ascent of anti-immigrant Nativism; as financial institutions crumble), the better the prospects for revolutionary politics is not a new idea. In “Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth,” authors James Davis, Sasha Lilley, David McNally and Eddie Yuen delve deeply into these parallel worlds. They artfully deconstruct the ideology predicting blight. Yet nowhere in the prose is there a clarion call for radicals to practice politics centered on lower expectations either. On the contrary, sharper struggle seems to be a primary encouragement. The result is an outstanding, albeit at moments disturbing and revealing, investigation not only of the neo-Nazis, survivalists and fellow travelers preparing for society’s decline but also of the marginal anarchist and quasi-Marxist tendencies anticipating popular revolts or American insurgencies.

Through film and television, both Christian and mainstream, many people are familiar with apocalyptic fantasies. As McNally , professor of political science at York University, reminds us, the cottage industry of zombie fiction and end-of-the-world horror have mushroomed in popularity. Still others have heard of conspiracy theories of forces like the Illuminati controlling the masses through all manner of machinations. In each scenario, from wild blockbuster films to little-known political theory, a cataclysmic crisis is often forecast as the spark that creates a rupture with the existing social order. In the Left milieu, Lilley, host of the radio program Against The Grain, correctly says, pining for and sometimes attempting to initiate this crisis can backfire on the Left and the environmental movement. At the same instant, catastrophism from the right wing, with its visions of assaults on the Western way of life, can often shape military and domestic policy.

Right-wing populism cooks up an ideological concoction in which the powerful, the godless and the all-seeing are closing in on our freedoms. What seems like a crude viewpoint is, as “Catastrophism” contributors remark, far more complicated than one might imagine. Cold War caricatures of work camps and groupthink mingle with fears of feminism and multiculturalism and the evisceration of “traditional values” as capital is concentrated. For the far Right, the product is a theoretical quilt in which a new Dark Age is just around the corner. The racheting up of such alarms can have horrifying consequences. A spike in hate crimes, mass killings by avowed white supremacists and the sharp rise in armed militias are among the more memorable occurrences. Quite tellingly, the image of the destruction of the American way of life through subversion has much in common with generations-old slurs against Catholicism and Judaism. This siege mentality cultivated by the Right, notes documentary filmmaker Davis, is happening in spite of capital’s seeming victory, with the virtual decimation of unions and workers’ rights, the gutting of social welfare programs, slashing of taxes for the wealthy and ascendance of quality-of-life policing espoused by the likes of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani among other things. This is in part because hegemony is often more critical than markets.

On the Left, particularly for the branch predicting social collapse via economic calamity, a similar affliction stunts progress. Faith that “heightening the contradictions” will create conditions for a mass movement or violent thousands-strong uprising against the status quo has long been an assumption that never really materialized. As many students of history saw with the Weather Underground Organization and other outfits, hoping to foment the revolution through random and even calculated targeting never monumentally changed the course of capital either. In truth, such suggestions, including in the radical environmental vein, take on an almost misanthropic veneer, where people are simply assumed as sleeping, unaware and merely needing a shove in the correct direction. Why those approaches were and still are wrong, and why political engagement is necessary are central themes here. A more sophisticated reading of history and theory, among other imperatives, are necessary, the authors reason. No level of retreat awaiting capitalism’s demise can replace grassroots struggle and community organizing for broad change.

“Catastrophism”‘s authors observe that the idea of capitalism’s and imperialism’s stretched resources and ultimate failure have held sway in the radical imagination since at least the 1800s. This sort of presentation is often paradoxical: glum forecasts of tuition cuts, foreclosures and collaborations between politicians on both sides of the aisle compete with claims capitalism’s crash is near and exhortations for a revolution that its organizers have no material basis in influencing let alone leading. On the Left, the idea that deepening social rifts and institutional failure to serve people’s needs will prompt a turn to radical politics seems a fixture in nearly every movement. Nowhere is such positioning as prominent as the environmental movement, where extinction for species, the landscape and humanity seems to always loom. However, as Yuen, author of “Confronting Capitalism” shares, the romance with terrifying imagery and vague solutions has inspired little more than hopelessness and certainly not a broad anti-capitalist commitment to mass organization. The truth is that capitalism is evolving constantly, and those with revolutionary hopes must as well.

Posited as an intervention of sorts, “Catastrophism” is seemingly aimed to create debate on the Left. And those interests in contemporary Left history are sure to be avid readers. Its premise, that old radical ideas that destitution leads to revolution need reappraisal, deserves closer review. Lilley and company provide much to digest in an excellent book sure to challenge some long-held political contentions.

Ernesto Aguilar is a media professional and writer based in Houston, Texas. He is a contributor to the books  “The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics“  and the forthcoming “The End of Prisons“.

In this context, Weiss’ book is a welcome effort to sort through her intellectual legacy in the U.S. In journalistic fashion, Weiss describes many facets of the Rand phenomenon, including the author herself, who comes across as thin-skinned and traumatized by her family’s fate in post-revolutionary Russia. There is also the inner circle which she gathered around her, “the collective,” riven by purges sparked by her own extra-marital affairs. Among the most notable members of the collective was Alan Greenspan, the former chief of the Federal Reserve, who Weiss portrays as unrepentant about his Randian past. Weiss also describes those who have preserved and promoted Rand’s intellectual legacy. And certainly not least, he describes her growing prominence among the grassroots of the American right. Here Weiss directs attention to the contradiction between Rand’s atheism, considered a core tenet of her “objectivist” philosophy, and the religiosity of the American right. He suggests that if this contradiction can be reconciled, Rand’s influence in American life will deepen. It should be noted here that Paul Ryan does in fact both embrace Rand and the religiosity that is so essential to the contemporary American right. The gulf between Rand’s objectivism and libertarianism, once vast, has already shrunk, although the hostility towards neoconservative military adventures among libertarians remains a source of tension.

I can’t say reading “Ayn Rand Nation” left me with greater respect for the author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” However, it did alarm me to learn of the growing extent of her influence in the U.S. Weiss has a point in urging left and liberal critics of this influence to sharpen their arguments against her philosophy, and promote them widely. It would also be relevant to examine what has happened in the U.S. that a “philosophy” that amounts to a tribute to selfishness has taken hold so widely. It is all the more ironic given the widespread religiosity of the American population. Not only her atheism, but her moral perspective is utterly at odds with all major religions, including the forms of Christianity most prominent in the U.S.