This collection of academic essays is edited by Bradley Jay Strawser, a philosophy professor at the US navy postgraduate school in California. Interviewed last year by the Guardian, Strawser was quoted as saying that, as far unmanned drones are concerned: ‘It’s all upside. There’s no downside. Both ethically and normatively, there’s a tremendous value.’
Like most collections of essays, some are better than others. In ‘Just War Theory and Remote Military Technology: A Primer’, Matthew Hallgarth, a former US air force major,…
Parecomic: The Story of Michael Albert and Participatory Economics is a clear, thoughtful and compelling introduction to some of the most challenging ideas around, and to an inspiring life of radical construction. After leading revolutionary student activism in the top scientific university in the US, MIT (the sanctuary described above had a huge impact), Michael Albert was the driving force in creating: an important radical…
Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar Lopez Rivera has the dubious distinction of being one of the longest-serving political prisoners in the world.
Having served in the US army in Vietnam, Rivera returned to Chicago and started working to improve living conditions for Puerto Ricans in the city.
Radicalised during this period, he became a forceful advocate for Puerto Rican independence from the United States. Facing police repression, Rivera went underground for several years. In 1981, he was captured and imprisoned for conspiring ‘…
Whether she’s recounting a wildcat strike by refuse workers in her home town of Brighton, an overland journey across the Eurasian landmass to Korea or helping to feed 10,000 protesters during the 2005 mobilisation against the G8 in Scotland, anarchist chef Isy Morgenmuffel’s autobiographical zine anthology Diary of a Miscreant, (112pp, available from www.activedistributionshop.org for £…
This book is about contemporary capitalism and how it generates and perpetuates a system of inequality and structural violence. Despite its hefty title, it’s a page-turner, accessible to the general reader, as well as having a solid and thorough clarity to hold its own in academic circles.
Using case studies from around the world, Leech illustrates the intentions and realities of capitalism’s economic and social theories and policies.
Remember how Thatcher’s programme for the privatisation of social housing in Britain was…
When a small group of weavers, colliers, woolsorters and cloggers opened a shop in north of England on 21 December 1844, Gabriel Carlyle writes, they can hardly have imagined the massive global impact their enterprise would ultimately have.
Though not the first consumer co-operative (Scotland’s Fenwick Weavers established an enterprise for the bulk purchasing of food in 1769), their far-sighted principles – which included not only a commitment to selling unadulterated food, but also the election of management on the basis of one…
The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich – considered by some to have been the greatest symphonist of the 20th century – lived through the October Revolution, the age of Stalin, and a good proportion of the post-Stalin Soviet years; he’s a composer who can’t be ignored by any activist interested in the cultural aspects of 20th century politics.
Music’s ‘meaning’, beyond the abstract and physical pleasure of the sounds, can relate to the political situation a composer is in, as well as to the cultural background in terms of what ideas…
A central figure in Stop the War Coalition (STWC) since its founding in 2001, Chris Nineham has written a short, timely and very readable book exploring the relationship between the anti-war movement and the Blair government in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Nineham provides a concise summary of the discussions within the Bush administration after 9/11 and an interesting analysis of the surprisingly positive media coverage of the anti-war protests in the UK circa 15 February 2003. He also recounts the panic the anti-war…
‘A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman with flame-colored hair, who marched uphill to meet her demise.’ So opens Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, as her heroine Dellarobia Turnbow staggers up the mountainside to start a potentially disastrous love affair. It’s an arresting beginning, and with any other writer betrayal, heartbreak and destruction would follow. But this is Kingsolver, a novelist with wider interests, and Dellarobia never reaches her…
‘What if something that didn’t happen had happened differently?’ is the tricksy question at the heart of Scottish Trotskyist Ken Macleod’s 2001 sci-fi novella The Human Front, re-printed here alongside two short essays and an interview with the author.
Like the shark in Jaws, the non-event in question is not revealed immediately, but its consequences are on display from page one.
It is 1963, and our narrator John Matheson – then a young boy living on the Isle of Lewis – hears Stalin’s death announced on the radio. The former…
It was the most unlikely victory-and-a-half.
In October 2006, direct action trainer and activist Daniel Hunter got a call from a friend, Jethro Heiko, asking him to join a campaigning group trying to stop two multi-million-dollar casinos being built in residential areas in Philadelphia where they both lived.
The backers of the projects were billionaires, the political establishment was solidly in favour of…
Yes, this review is a bit late, for a book published in 2009, but this is a book we really didn’t want you to miss out on.
If you’re interested in Israel, then finding out that the foundation stones of the new society, the co-operatives known as kibbutzim, were explicitly as well as implicitly inspired by anarchism is pretty extraordinary.
If you’re interested in anarchism, then learning how these super-egalitarian communes have evolved over the last century (in very…
Here is a literary biography that gripped me all the way to the end. Robert Leach describes the individual lives of the playwrights John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy, but the core of this study is their creative relationship. John started his adult life as an architect and Margaretta as an actress. In Leach’s narrative, on an evening in 1956, as John was beginning his career as a highly regarded young writer creating plays for the prestigious Royal Court Theatre, the pair made a pact that they would use drama to liberate theatre, explore…
Patrolling the pavement of one of Mexico City’s “red-light” districts, a group of heavily made-up women wearing short skirts and high heels hold placards up to potential clients. These placards read – in words daubed on in menstrual blood – “I am your mirror”. Intermingling with clients and other passers-by, they reflect back their responses, whether puzzled facial expressions or cries of surprise.
This performance piece — put on in February by a group of Mexico City activists —…
Black women’s movement and civil rights activist Olive Morris – who became a symbol of the squatting movement in ’70s Brixton – is one of 30 women profiled and ‘icon-brush[ed] ... with Che Guevara glam’ in the Queen of the Neighbourhood Collective’s book of stencil designs, Revolutionary Women, inspired by the question ‘Who and where are our revolutionary women icons?’ Others featured include Egyptian feminist Doria Shafik, who led the 1951 storming of the Egyptian parliament by 1,500 women, and Dutch resistance fighter Hanni Schaft, the…