Class War is Outdated

  • 2024/01/23 18:01

From back cover:

“Imagine, moreover, if all these protesters and indignant people were satisfied in terms of wages and regained the bourgeois dream of a country house, two cars and four televisions at the sole price of the ever-increasing impoverishment of immigrants, how quickly they would return to their comfortable couch…

…economic poverty is often not conducive to the prospect of anarchist liberation. It is no coincidence that in the past some of the fascist and totalitarian regimes were established on poverty and economic deprivation, after having presented themselves as the solution of salvation and exit from the crisis. Indeed, the impoverished masses often saw Hitler or Mussolini as their redeeming leaders. After all, it was ‘the poor people’ themselves who brought these scumbags to power through elections. This is because for someone who is financially desperate, usually his priority is to save by any means the basic necessities of life.

He is not in the mood to consider that there is a different life proposition that is not ruled by inequality and exploitation. What he is concerned with is a proposal or at least a promise that will now get him out of his impasse.”

Class War is Outdated pdf

Nihilism, Anarchy, and the 21st Century

  • 2024/01/23 17:30

From back cover:

“Socialism will continue to have its adherents, who are attracted to its perspective of history, its democratic perspective of inclusion and participation, and its apparent dominance in the field of social contestation. Its criticism of Nihilism begins with the position of deep revulsion at its a-humanist perspective and practice. If we were to review the history of Socialism, we would see that a rejection of humanism is not necessary to inflict involuntary horrors upon real living people. If there is a lesson to take from the Soviet Union, The People’s Republic of China, or the Khmer Rouge it is that good intentions, and the practice of historical materialism, can stack up the bodies as well as the systems they would oppose.

What Nihilism provides then is an alternative to the alternative that does not embed an idealist image of the new world it would create. It is not an Idealist project. Nihilism states that it is not useful to talk about the society you ‘hold in your stomach’, the things you would do ‘if only you got power’, or the vision that you believe that we all share. What is useful is the negation of the existing world. Nihilism is the political philosophy that begins with the negation of this world. What exists beyond those gates has yet to be written.”

Nihilism, Anarchy, and the 21st Century pdf

The Anarchist Diet: Vegetarianism and Individualist Anarchism in Early 20th-Century France

  • 2024/01/19 23:44

From back cover:

“The history of anarcho-individualist veganism is practically unknown by the libertarian movement itself. In fact, when French anarchists began writing about environmentalism in the 1970s and veganism in the 1990s, no reference was made to their individualist predecessors of the first half of the 20th century…

…The first part of this article provides a synopsis of anarchism Individualist before looking at the naturian and its defense of the animal cause movement. The second part examines individualist anarchists’ motives for adopting a plant-based diet, many of which, as we shall see, are just as topical as ever. The concluding remarks will highlight the fact that veganism allows us to better understand a vastly understudied strand of anarchism, namely individualism.”

The Anarchist Diet_Vegetarianism and Individualist Anarchism in Early 20th Century France pdf

Education as the Domestication of Inner Space

  • 2024/01/19 19:01

From back cover:

“We are taught since early childhood that everything in the world exists in a food chain as a “resource” to be consumed by those higher up the chain and concurrently as the consumer of “resources” that are lower in this predatory hierarchy. We are also told that life in the wild is hungry, fraught with mortal danger and that civilization has spared us a short and brutish existence. As children, we thus come to believe that life in civilization is good for us, in fact even indispensable for our very survival…”

“…Since civilization is rooted in the appropriation of food and “natural resources” as well as of slave labour (dogs, horses, cows, women, miners, farmers, et al), all of our institutions today inadvertently cater to these constructs and the needs that have been generated by this monocultural perspective. That is why every contemporary institution or company has a department of “human resources” and is thereby linked to managing, killing, and protecting the ownership of “natural” and other resources.

Hence, everything, including humans, became “professionalized” and thus divided into gendered, ethnic, racial, and other categories specializing in specific spheres of labour thereby falling into defined niches of the “food chain”. Language reflects these categories and naturalizes oppression. For instance, in European languages, humanity is conflated with maleness. The word “woman” allows us to unconsciously accept that womanhood entails an aspect of humanness which erases our (female) animality thereby excluding the depersonified nonhuman animals from the privileges accorded to some animals (a small group of primates) by belonging to “humanity”. Moreover, by separating these categories of humanity, animality, femaleness, maleness, race, ethnicity, et al., language veils the racist, speciesist, and patriarchal essence of civilization where human and nonhuman women have been relegated to a class specializing in the production of human and nonhuman resources.”

Education As The Domestication of Inner Space pdf