S.C.U.M. Manifesto
Valerie Solanas
Aside from being a deranged homicidal dyke, the late Valerie Solanas was also a visionary social theorist. Before she became infamous as the would-be assassin of Andy Warhol, Valerie, already well established as a conspicuous daub of lower Manhattan’s local color, founded the one-woman terrorist organization S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) and wrote the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, a wonderfully toxic anti-capitalist, lesbian separatist rant that puts the blame squarely where it belongs: on those fucked-up male chauvinist pigs! S.C.U.M. sends out a clarion call to “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Other targets: hippies, “great art,” fatherhood, politeness, “pussy.” She cobbles out her thesis in such a charmingly autocratic style that even her more dubious notions (sex is out in her utopia) read like common sense. And just because a few billion people would have to be butchered to implement her plan doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s wrong. Who needs Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin? Pick up S.C.U.M. Manifesto and learn the real definition of “feminazi.” MG
Publisher: AK
Paperback: 24 pages
Test Card F: Television, Mythinformation and Social Control
Anonymous
“A graphic demolition derby through the culture of a factory-farmed and show-shocked society, a society whose sell-by date has long since expired. Using savage image/text cut-and-paste this controversial book explodes all previous media theories and riots through the Global Village, looting the ideological supermarkets of all its products: anti-fascism, Malcolm X, James Bulger, the Gulf War, satanic abuse, Somalia and Eastern Europe. Test Card F joyrides in front of the surveillance cameras, amid the rubble of a junkyard nation, and heaves television’s burnt-out carcass through the plate-glass shop window of ‘independent’ video and ‘community access’ broadcasting. It transcends postmodern and Situationist analysis in its positive refusal of the concept of Truth.” AK
Publisher: AK
Paperback: 80 pages
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Anarcho-Syndicalism
Rudolf Rocker
Anarchy in the U.K.: The Angry Brigade
Tom Vague
Germany spawned the Red Army Faction; Italy, the Red Brigades; France, Action Directe; the United States, the Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army… Britain had the Angry Brigade. Much more than a small group of individuals, the Angry Brigade was a movement that challenged reaction and state power in all its forms. Part of a general European resistance movement, its was an armed offensive grounded in substantial popular support. No leaders, do it yourself… Here, in Tom Vague’s notorious, barbed, pop-culture style, is the story of Britain’s premier revolutionary hooligans. Draws extensively on the Angry Brigade’s communiqués, along with both the underground/countercultural and mainstream press of the late ‘60s through the early ‘70s, and police and court documents. AK
Publisher: AK
Paperback: 160 pages
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Neither God Nor Master
Daniel Guerin
This is the first English translation of Guerin’s monumental anthology of anarchism. It details, through a vast array of hitherto unpublished documents, writings, letters and reports, the history, organization and practice of the anarchist movement as well as its theorists, advocates and activists. AK
Publisher: AK
Paperback: 304 pages
Reinventing Anarchy, Again
Edited by Howard Ehrlich
Brings together the major currents of social anarchist theory in a collection of some of the movement’s important writers from the U.S., Canada, England and Australia. The book opens with an exploration of the past and future possibilities of anarchism; then moves to consider the “necessity” of the state and bureaucratic organization as well as the meaning of the “anarchist contract.” The third of the theoretical sections tackles the hard questions for social anarchists confronting the foundations of libertarian socialist and liberal democratic thought. AK
Publisher: AK
Paperback: 400 pages
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Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm
Murray Bookchin
At times Bookchin looks like an angry grampa lamenting for the good old days of the traditional Left, yet he makes some good points and vital distinctions concerning different forms of anarchism past and present. Bookchin’s assault on the work of Michel Foucault and Hakim Bey (to mention two) are for the most part reductive yet humorous. The great observation Bookchin makes here is that there is a huge reinvestment in ego-driven existentialism among members of the “X Generation” who flaunt an anarchist identity. What he describes as lifestyle anarchy deservedly sounds like good old American individualism. Bookchin points out the vital social content in the anarchist ideas of Bakunin and Kropotkin and cites significant events such as the Spanish anarchist struggle of the 1930s as elements not to be overlooked when considering anarchy as a viable option. KH
Publisher: AK
Paperback: 92 pages
The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays
Nestor Makhno
Makhno was a Ukrainian peasant revolutionary who for several years before, during and after the Russian Revolution successfully led an anarchist army which fought against both the Bolsheviks and the White counterrevolutionaries. From exile in Paris, Makhno aggressively refuted allegations of anti-Semitism and of having conducted pogroms in essays like “To the Jews of All Countries,” and commemorated the tragic fate of the workers in Kronstadt, who fought the Red Army in 1921 to try to implement the Bolshevik proclamations regarding equality and worker autonomy. These essays are the hard-won insights of a fighting anarchist who could clearly the see totalitarian realities behind the propaganda of the early Soviet era. In his essay “The ABC of the Revolutionary Anarchist,” Makhno writes, “Experience of practical struggle strengthened my conviction that anarchism educates man in a living way. It is a teaching every bit as revolutionary as life, and it is a teaching every bit as varied and potent in its manifestations as man’s creative existence and, indeed, is intimately bound up with that.” SS
Publisher: AK
Paperback: 126 pages
To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936
Murray Bookchin
Like most of Bookchin’s writing, this book is delivered clearly and easily like a union speech, generous with emotion as well as relevant dates, people and statistics. Bookchin includes some fine descriptions of peasant-based governing structures developed out of particular circumstance and need in resistance to centralized governing structures which overtake and oppress. Bookchin also describes the factioning and Stalinism which pitted Communist against Communist against anarchist, sabotaging the entire effort of the Spanish people to avoid a brutal dictatorship under Franco. This period in Spain was a brief moment that produced radical social forms which actually worked. Bookchin has written a most enthusiastic guide for this vital set of events. KH
Publisher: AK
Paperback: 74 pages
Illustrated