Autonomedia Books via Leftwingbooks.NET
Autonomedia described itself as “an autonomous zone for arts radicals in both old and new media. We publish books on radical media, politics and the arts that seek to transcend party lines, bottom lines and straight lines.” For years a wonderful source of books at the intersection of autonomous Marxism, feminism, and anarchism, perhaps most notable Silvia Federici’s groundbreaking Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation.
Via Leftwingbooks.NET, Kersplebedeb distributes a selection of books from Autonomedia. We just managed to replenish our stock (including getting more copies of Caliban and the Witch, at last!) — here is what we currently have:
“The Power of Neighborhood” and the Commons
The anonymous Swiss author of bolo’bolo and Akiba offers a new practical proposal for reshaping the future, based on this prognosis of the present:
“Our economic system is stumbling from one collapse to the next … Our system is fundamentally flawed and destabilized by internal contradictions. To point out one of them: income can only be generated by work, but work is getting scarce at the moment and will become even scarcer in the future. Thus the “purchasing power” that capital needs to realize value is strangulated by itself. These contradictions are being deferred into the future by financial manipulations … The metaphor of the train racing towards an abyss and the need to pull the emergency brake must spring to mind. Since the braking distance has meanwhile become longer than the distance to the abyss, we have to think in terms of parachutes.’’
Assault on the Impossible
Assault on the Impossible is the second Autonomedia title to concentrate on the Provo period in the Netherlands. The Provo movement is unique in the modern era for having radically reshaped the political foundations of an important Western nation virtually without violence. Political change is often tumultuous, but never takes place in cultural isolation. Actuating the revolutionary impulse requires activating large groups of people, generating “group minds” capable of reimagining the realities they inhabit.
Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology
This book is the most comprehensive discussion to date of Murray Bookchin’s social ecology. But David Watson goes far beyond social ecology to explore new paths of thinking about radical politics. His visionary ecology challenges the mystique of progress and proposes a more holistic notion of reason both primal and modern, skeptical and mythopoetic.
bolo’bolo
“In a larger city we could find the following bolos: Alco-bolo, Sym-bolo, Les-bolo, Play-bolo, No-bolo, Sado-bolo, Maso-bolo, Blue-bolo, Dia-bolo, Marl-bolo, Marx-bolo, Anarcho-bolo, Incapa-bolo, Herb-bolo, Jesu-bolo, Krishna-bolo, and so on… all assisting in the substruction of the capitalist and/or socialist Planetary Work Machine.”
Caliban and the Witch
A groundbreaking herstorical exploration, in many ways similar to Maria Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Caliban and the Witch focuses much more on Europe, while bringing Federici’s own autonomous Marxist perspective to bear on the subject at hand.
You may also be interested to check out the in-depth review/exploration of Caliban and the Witch that i wrote several years ago.
CANADAs
“The soft matrices of a nation eclate; an exploded diagram. This anthology redraws Canada as a complex terra incognita of desire and dismay” — or so went the orginal blurb when this semiotext(e) compilation first came out in the 1990s.
Semiotext(e) CANADAs brought together over fifty writers — activists, weirdos, counterculture types, revolutionaries — to basically say where things were at with their scenes, their politics, and the country they were inside of. Notable mentions include Joe David and Milton Born With a Tooth, Marc Drouin and Julianne Pidduck, Jim Campbell and Michael William, and many others. Themes range from queerness to Indigenous resistance to armed struggle to culture jamming. And beyond. A period piece.
Cannabis Chassidis: The Ancient and Emerging Torah of Drugs
Is Marijuana kosher? Yes, of course it is. But the better question is: If I am going to get higher than high, isn’t there some useful, traditional guidance about how to best do so? If not, then what good is the Torah?
Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles
Can we find alternatives to the failed radical projects of the twentieth-century? What are the possible forms of struggle today? How do we fight back against the misery of our crisis-ridden present? “Communization” is the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the state, which haunts Europe, Southern California, and wherever the real abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on the terrain of capitalism new practices of the “human strike,” autonomous communes, occupation, and insurrection have attacked the alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and insecure.
Contract & Contagion
Contract and Contagion presents a theoretical approach for understanding the complex shifts of post-Fordism and neoliberalism by way of a critical reading of contracts, and through an exploration of the shifting politics of the household. It focuses on the salient question of capitalist futurity in order to highlight the simultaneously intimate, economic and political limits to venturing beyond its horizon.
Conversations with Durito: Stories of the Zapatistas and Neoliberalism
Soon after the Zapatistas emerged into public view in January, 1994, Subcomandante Marcos replied to a letter from a young girl in Mexico City with a tale of a tobacco-stealing beetle who was angry about the recent military invasion and the threat of so many soldiers’ boots to such small creatures as himself. The beetle, Don Durito de la Lacondon, tells Marcos that he is “studying neoliberalism and its strategy of domination for Latin America” in order to discover how long the Zapatista struggle, and by extension his own, would last. This marks the beginning of a long series of letters and communiqués between Marcos and Don Durito, a correspondence shared with various national newspapers and magazines, inventively explaining the shifting politics of the Zapatista struggle and their history as an organization and movement.
Cracking the Movement: Squatting Beyond the Media
Amoral tales of autonomous action and adventure from within the Dutch squatters’ movement of the 1980s.
Deadly She-Wolf: Assassination at Armageddon (book and cd)
Deadly She-Wolf: Assassination at Armageddon was the last completed full-stage production of a Fred Ho manga-opera, written by Ho and Ruth Margraff in homage to the 1970s yellow exploitation manga-movie series, Lone Wolf and Cub.
Devil’s Anarchy
By rebelling against hierarchical society and living under the Jolly Roger, pirates created an upside-down world of anarchist organization and festival, with violence and death ever-present. This creation was not a purely whimsical process. In The Devil’s Anarchy, Stephen Snelders examines rare 17th-century Dutch pirate histories to show the continuity of a shared pirate culture, embodied in its modes of organization, methods of distributing booty and resolving disputes, and tendencies for high living.
Dreamer Of The Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International
This astonishing biography traces the clandestine career of one’s man’s life inside a John Le Carre-like story of very real-world espionage, conspiracy, and ruthless political intrigue. From his involvement in fascist groups like the Silver Shirts in the 1930s to his ties to Nazi spy networks both during and after World War II; his connection to German exile groups in Argentina and Egypt, his stormy relationship with both Oswald Mosley and Gerald L.K. Smith; his work for Senator Joseph McCarthy and his activity on behalf of the postwar Fascist International in Europe, the Mid-East, and the Americas; from Holocaust denial to American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell.
Fast Feminism
FF is a post-gender provocateur, not so much a gender terrorist as a gender risk-taker going the distance with her body. FF’s philosophy is lived. Actions count. One resists with one’s body.
Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness
In Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and the New Eugenic Consciousness, Critical Art Ensemble focuses its sights on the new frontier of pan-capital — the political and economic development of flesh products and services. CAE begins mapping this development by examining the use of reproductive technologies to achieve an intensified degree of control over worker and consumer-citizen. This book aims to establish a counter-narrative to the spectacular promises of the life industries.
Fukushima Mon Amour
Four literary-political essays documenting the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of March 2011, following the earthquake and tsunami of that date in Japan.
Gynocide: Hysterectomy, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Medical Abuse of Women
Examining the historical, legal, ethical, psychological and medical aspects of deeply sexist practices in defining and treating issues of contemporary women’s health.
Marching Plague
The sixth Critical Art Ensemble book offers a radical reframing of the rhetoric surrounding germ warfare. After refuting the idea that massive biological attack is a probable future occurrence, the book goes on to argue that biological weapons programs primarily serve the economic interests of the military-security complex, squandering resources needed to fight the massive loss of life each year from emerging infectious diseases. The book also includes two appendices examining the case of the U.S.
Model Children: Inside the Republic of Red Scarves
The son of long-time French Communist Party chief Maurice Thorez recounts his post-war childhood summers at Artek, the prestigious Crimean summer camp for children of the Soviet elite. A warm, even tender, yet also devastating insight into aspects of Soviet political culture rarely revealed before in the West.
Night Vision: A First to Third World Vampyre Opera
Night Vision is an opera, tracking a 2000-year old female vampyre who rises to pop music superstardom, hyped by a Renfield-like diabolical techno-genius, The Spin Doctor.
Open Utopia
Opinion polls, volatile voting patterns, and street protests demonstrate widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, yet the popular response so far has largely been limited to the angry outcry of No! But negation, by itself, affects nothing. The dominant system doesn’t dominate because people agree with it; it rules because we’re convinced there is no alternative.
Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes
A pirate holy war and conversion of Islam as praxis of social resistance, from the 16th to the 19th century.
Precarious Communism: Manifest Mutations, Manifesto Detourned
How does one demonstrate the enduring relevance of a sacred text but to help it speak to present times? This is what churches do with the Bible and what Marxists do with the writings of Marx.
Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower
The intersection of academia and punk. Seriously.
Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays In Post-Political…
Fourteen radical essays in “open” or “autonomous” Marxism, subverting (by critiquing) the typical concept of the political, and examining the current configurations of the insurrection of global labor against global capital.
Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination
Written in the wake of the anti-globalization movement and the rise of the war on terror, these essays survey the political landscape for signs of hope in unexpected places.
Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles
Squatting offers a radical but simple solution to the crises of housing, homelessness, and the lack of social space that mark contemporary society: occupying empty buildings and rebuilding lives and communities in the process. Squatting has a long and complex history, interwoven with the changing and contested nature of urban politics over the last forty years.
Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future: Insurrection, Movement, Commons
An anthology of contemporary revolutionary writings from the autonomous Marxist tradition.
Taqwa
A compilation of 18 songs from various bands from the literarily-inspired Taqwacore, Muslim punk, scene.
TAZ
The underground cult bestseller! Essays that redefine the psychogeographical nooks of autonomy. Recipes for poetic terror, anarcho black magic, post-situ psychotropic surgery, denunciations of spiritual addictions to vapid infotainment cults this is the bastard classic, the watermark impressed upon our minds. Where conscience informs praxis, and action infects consciousness, TAZ is beginning to worm its way into above-ground culture.
The Anarchists
The Anarchists was first published in English by Benj. R. Tucker, the anarchist editor of Liberty in New York City. It is a thinly-disguised autobiographical journey of transformation from revolutionary self-martyrdom to radical self-ownership. Mackay’s authentic Kulturgemalde begins in Victorian London, its five million people struggling with poverty, class conflict, police brutality, and seething with proletarian discontent over the impending execution of othe Haymarket Anarchists in Chicago.
The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital
Given how we often do not pay enough attention to questions of unwaged labour, including housework, and the continuing dearth of analysis of the role of prostitution in making capitalism tick, it is always nice to see someone trying to grapple with these questions.
Once upon a time i wrote a review/exploration of Fortunati’s book; you can read it here.
The Essence of Jargon
A poet, translator, and co-editor (of the letters of her late husband, Situationist Guy Debord) who has written extensively on the etymology and history of European slang, Alice Becker-Ho examines argot as a form of self-defense from the State, a code for people who survived outside the law. “In slang, loan words are above all borrowings of one dangerous class from another; that these loan words, confirmed in different slangs, go back to common sources, themselves blended initially into a sort of melting pot before being redistributed via a host of different routes….”
The Molecular Invasion
Having exhausted the possibilities for geographic colonial expansion, as well as reaching the fiscal limitations of virtual space, capital begins its invasion of a new frontier — organic molecular space.
The Root is Man
“We must emphasize the emotions, the imagination, the moral feelings, the primacy of the individual human being, must restore the balance that has been broken by the hypertrophy of science in the last two centuries. The root is man, here and not there, now and not then.” —from the text
The Taqwacores
Muslim punk rock novel, which inspired a musical subculture.
The Work of Love: Unpaid Housework, Poverty and Sexual Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century
This classic “manifesta” of radical Italian feminism helped define the autonomist-inspired “wages for housework” movement, and identified the capitalist complicity of both the traditional nuclear family as well as the “liberation” of the woman as wage-earner.
This World We Must Leave and Other Essays
Challenging post-Marxist essays translated and reprinted from Jacques Camatte’s journal Invariance.
Toward a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory
Starting from the proposition that what was once the factory is now the university, the problem is to transform the field of tension delineated by the processes analyzed in this book into specific forms of resistance and the organization of escape routes.
Truth and Dare
“Truth and Dare: The world is ending, and the revolution has begun!”
Truth and Dare is a comic book and a curriculum, a graphic novel and a gateway to further knowledge and action. With fifty pages of illustrations from nine different world-class artists, and a ten page curriculum and resource list, it is a crash course in world history, political economy, sociology, gender studies, ecology, climate change and the world-wide ecosocialist struggle for humanity and nature in the 21st century.
Unleashing the Collective Phantoms
These insurgent essays describe, prolong and critique some of the cultural and artistic projects that arose with the worldwide wave of protests around the turn of the millennium, against what the global South calls neoliberalism. Dissent and the refusal of a programmed existence continually return to the streets; but they also unfold in the imagination. Complex discourses and elaborate fictions weave their way through images, gestures and hilarious scenarios, hovering at the edges of reality and searching for whoever will give them voice.
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