Revolutionary Pocketbooks

Amid the clashes, complexities, and political personalities of world politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Peter Kropotkin stands out. Born a prince in Tsarist Russia and sent to Siberia to learn his militaristic, aristocratic trade, he instead renounced his titles and took up the "beautiful idea" of anarchism. Across a continent, he would become known as a passionate advocate of a world without borders, without kings and bosses. From a Russian cell to France, to London and Brighton, he used his extraordinary mind to dissect the birth of State power and then present a different vision, one in which the human impulse to liberty can be found throughout history, undying even in times of defeat. In the three essays presented here, Kropotkin attempted to distill his many insights into brief but brilliant essays on the state, anarchism, and the ideology for which he became a founding name-anarchist communism. With a detailed and rich introduction from Brian Morris, and accompanied by bibliographic notes from Iain McKay, this collection contextualizes and contemporizes three of Kropotkin's most influential essays.

"Communization" means something quite straightforward: a revolution that starts to change social relations immediately. It would extend over years, decades probably, but from Day One it would begin to do away with wage-labor, profit, productivity, private property, classes, States, masculine domination, and more. There would be no "transition period" in the Marxist sense, no period when the "associated producers" continue furthering economic growth to create the industrial foundations of a new world. Communization means a creative insurrection that would bring about communism, not its preconditions. Thus stated, it sounds simple enough. The questions are what, how, and by whom. That is what this book is about. Communization is not the be-all and end-all that solves everything and proves wrong all past critical theory. The concept was born out of a specific period, and we can fully understand it by going back to how people personally and collectively experienced the crises of the 1960s and '70s. The notion is now developing in the maelstrom of a new crisis, deeper than the Depression of the 1930s, among other reasons because of its ecological dimension, a crisis that has the scope and magnitude of a crisis of civilization. This is not a book that glorifies existing struggles as if their present accumulation were enough to result in revolution. Radical theory is meaningful if it addresses the question: How can proletarian resistance to exploitation and dispossession achieve more than aggravate the crisis? How can it reshape the world?

For Emma Goldman, the "High Priestess of Anarchy," anarchism was "a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions," but "the most elemental force in human life" was something still more basic and vital: sex. "The Sex Question" emerged for Goldman in multiple contexts, and we find her addressing it in writing on subjects as varied as women's suffrage, "free love," birth control, the "New Woman," homosexuality, marriage, love, and literature. It was at once a political question, an economic question, a question of morality, and a question of social relations. But, her analysis of that most elemental force remained fragmentary, scattered across numerous published (and unpublished) works and conditioned by numerous contexts. Anarchy and the Sex Question draws together the most important of those scattered sources, uniting both familiar essays and archival material, in an attempt to recreate the great work on sex that Emma Goldman might have given us. In the process, it sheds light on Goldman's place in the history of feminism.

For over sixty years, Selma James has been organizing from the perspective of unwaged women who, with their biological and caring work, reproduce the whole, human race-along with whatever other labor they are performing. This work goes on almost unnoticed everywhere on the planet and in every culture. When this work is not economically prioritized, politically protected, or socially supported there are dire consequences for the whole of humanity, beginning with women and children. This much-anticipated follow-up to her first anthology, Sex, Race, and Class, compiles several decades of James's work with a focus on her more recent writings, including a groundbreaking analysis of C.L.R. James's two masterpieces, The Black Jacobins and Beyond a Boundary, and an account of her formative partnership with him over three decades. Her experience with the Caribbean movement for independence and federation is reflected in her introduction to Ujamaa, the extraordinary work of Tanzanians to bypass capitalism, and much more. Steeped in the tradition of Marx, James draws on half a century of organizing across sectors, struggles and national boundaries with others in the Wages for Housework Campaign and the Global Women's Strike, an autonomous network of women, men, and other genders that agree with their perspective. There is one continuum between the care and protection of people and of the planet: both must be a priority, beginning with a care income for everyone doing this vital work. James makes the powerful argument that the climate justice movement can draw on all the movements' people have formed to refuse their particular exploitation, to destroy the capitalist hierarchy that is destroying the world. Our time is now.

The Chinese Revolution changed the face of the twentieth century, and the politics that issued from it-often referred to as "Maoism"-resonated with colonized and oppressed people from the 1970s down to the anticapitalistic movements of today. But, how did these politics first emerge? And, what do they offer activists today, who seek to transform capitalist society at its very foundations? Maoism and the Chinese Revolution offers the novice reader a sweeping overview of five decades of Maoist revolutionary history. It covers the early years of the Chinese Communist Party, through decades of guerrilla warfare and rapid industrialization, to the massive upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. It traces the development of Mao Zedong's military and political strategy, philosophy, and statecraft amid the growing contradictions of the Chinese revolutionary project. All the while, it maintains a perspective sympathetic to the everyday workers and peasants who lived under the party regime, and who in some moments stood poised to make the revolution anew. From the ongoing "people's wars" in the Global South, to the radical lineages of many black, Latino, and Asian revolutionaries in the Global North, Maoist politics continue to resonate today. As a new generation of activists take to the streets, this book offers a critical review of our past, in order to better transform the future.

Perhaps no period has so marked, so deformed, or so defined the anarchist movement as the three years in France from 1892 to 1894, the years known as the Age of Attentats, the years dominated by the Propagandists of the Deed. Death to Bourgeois Society tells the story of four young anarchists who were guillotined in France in the 1890s. Their courage was motivated by noble ideals whose realization they saw their bombs and assassinations as hastening. In a time of cynicism and political decay for many, they represented a purity lacking in society, and their actions when they were captured, their forthrightness, their defiance up to the guillotine only added to their luster. The texts collected in Death to Bourgeois Society focus on the main avatars of this movement: the grave robber/murderer/terrorist Ravachol; Auguste Vaillant, who bombed the Chamber of Deputies; Emile Henry, who attacked both the bourgeois in their class function and their very existence, and the Italian immigrant Santo Caserio, who brought down the curtain on the age when he assassinated the French president Sadi Carnot. The volume contains key first person narratives of the events, from Ravachol's forbidden speech and his account of his life, to Henry's questioning at his trial and his programmatic letter to the director of the prison in which he was held, to Vaillant's confrontation with the investigators immediately after tossing his bomb, and Caserio's description of the assassination and his defense at his trial.

In his foreword to an earlier collection of essays on libertarian communism, Daniel Guérin addressed himself to younger people "alienated from ideologies and 'isms' shorn of any meaning by an earlier generation" and particularly from "socialism, which has so often been betrayed by those who claimed to speak in its name, and which now provokes an understandable skepticism." In this collection of essays, written between the 1950s and 1980s and published here for the first time in English, Guérin not only provides a critique of the socialist and communist parties of his day, he analyzes some of the most fundamental and pressing questions with which all radicals must engage. He does this by revisiting and attempting to draw lessons from the history of the revolutionary movement from the French Revolution, through the conflicts between anarchists and Marxists in the International Workingmen's Association and the Russian and Spanish revolutions, to the social revolution of 1968. These are not just abstract theoretical reflections, but are informed by the experiences of a lifetime of revolutionary commitments and by his constant willingness to challenge orthodoxies of all kinds: "Far from allowing ourselves to sink into doubt, inaction, and despair, the time has come for the left to begin again from zero, to rethink its problems from their very foundations. The failure of both reformism and Stalinism imposes on us the urgent duty to find a way of reconciling (proletarian) democracy with socialism, freedom with Revolution."

For fifteen-year-old Joe Martin, growing up on the outskirts of West London, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, busy pubs, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cutthroat Teddy Boys and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet-until he is attacked by a gang of youths and thrown into the Grand Union Canal with his best friend Smiles. Fast forward to 1988, and Joe is travelling home on the Trans-Siberian Express after three years away, remembering the highs and lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with tragedy. Fast forward to 2000, and life is sweet once more. Joe is earning a living selling records and fight tickets, playing his favorite 45s as a punk DJ, but when a face from the past steps out of the mist he is forced to relive that night in 1977 and deal with the fallout. Human Punk is the story of punk, a story of friendship, a story of common bonds and a shared culture sticking the boot in, sticking together.

In the years following 1968, a number of people involved in the most radical aspects of the French general strike felt the need to reflect on their experiences and to relate them to past revolutionary endeavors. This meant studying previous attempts and theories, namely those of the post-1917 German-Dutch and Italian Communist Left. The original essays included here were first written between 1969 and 1972 and circulated amongst left communist and worker circles. But, France was not the only country where radicals sought to contextualize their political environment and analyze their own radical pasts. Over the years, these three essays have been published separately in various languages and printed as books in both the United States and the UK with few changes. This English edition, is updated to take into account the contemporary political situation; half of the present volume is new material. The book argues that doing away with wage-labor, class, the State, and private property is necessary, possible, and can only be achieved, by a historical break, one that would certainly differ from October 1917...yet, it would not be a peaceful, gradual, piecemeal evolution either. Like their historical predecessors-Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Amadeo Bordiga, Durruti, and Debord-the authors maintain a belief in revolution.