A Comparative Review “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” – Karl Marx, Capital Volume One; Chapter 10 “The association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times . . . So long as all the increased wealth…

Assets in Common: Stories of Business and Community Leaders Remaking the Economy From the Ground Up. Chelsea Robinson, ed.  Charity May, Jay Standish, Chelsea Robinson, Zoe Schlag, Derek Razo, contributors. Foreword by Zoe Schlag and Derek Razo of Common Trust (Infrastructure for Shared Ownership, 2024). This book is published under the auspices of the Infrastructure…

Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals In 1971, American activist Saul Alinsky published a book called Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals. Alinsky bemoaned the fact that activists, with “no illusions about the system,” sought to “Burn the system down!” Many of these same activists had “plenty of illusions about the way to…

The latest success in trans publishing is Jules Gill-Peterson’s A Short History of Trans Misogyny. Released at a time of global backlash to trans rights in a coalition bringing together figures as varied as J.K. Rowling and Javier Milei, it purports to analyze the origins of a world in which hatred of transfemininity has become…

Sanders’ book centers on two tasks facing the American people. He states them at the outset. First: These Americans [the predominantly younger voters who supported Sanders’ candidacy] understand that proposals that tinker around the edges are an insufficient response to the enormous crises we face. For them, there is a rapidly growing recognition that this…

As an anarchist, I am naturally inclined to research not only anarchist movements from America, but from all around the world. I am very fond of Lao Tzu, for instance, and the Tao Te Ching author was a major influence on prominent anarchists like Peter Kropotkin and Rudolf Rocker. Therefore, I have learned some things…

Science fiction has always been an important playground of radical politics for anarchists, libertarians, and socialists alike. My personal favorite is Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (the two completed novels of her Earthseed series), which tell the story of a United States of the 2030s in the midst of…

Labadie Reviews Nock Our Enemy, the State, by Albert Jay Nock* Mr. Nock begins with the vital distinction between the State and society, showing in the course of his work, that the State, every State, originated and functions for only one purpose—conquest and economic exploitation. Although resting upon violence, the State, in the final analysis,…

David Harvey. A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (London and New York: Verso, 2023). David Harvey may be familiar to some from his background as a Marxist geographer focusing on neoliberalism and uneven development, or for his development of Henri Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” concept. The Grundrisse itself amounts, more or less, to a voluminous…

Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein. Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company (New York: Hachette Group, 2022). Why Managers Matter is a response to the excessive and sometimes gush celebration of flattened hierarchies among management faddists like 90s management fad Tom Peters and his successors. Ironically, this book reminds me of…

David Graeber. Pirate Enlightenment, Or the Real Libertalia (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2023). “This is a book about pirate kingdoms, real and imagined,” Graeber begins what is likely to be the last book that appears under his name. “It’s also about a time and place where it is very difficult to tell the difference between…

Let’s be clear from the outset: Conflict Is Not Abuse is not even remotely the same thing as the sentiment or thesis that “conflict is not abuse.” Much of the success Sarah Schulman’s book has seen is the result of people wanting a defense of the latter thesis and assuming her appropriation of the pre-existing…

Words have different meanings in South Africa. The overlay of specific socio-political senses arising out of a legacy of racial authoritarianism has so overshadowed the ordinary senses in which common words are used elsewhere in the world, that words are as good as lost. Thus location as denoting the “township,” the companion or shadow town…

Review: The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism In 1910 Luigi Fabbri and Armando Borghi abducted an anarchist woman who had shamed their friend by divorcing him. Together, they forced her into a gynecological exam so the doctor could publicly pronounce her deformed and incapable of sex. All three were prominent leaders in the Italian anarchist…

Muammar Gaddafi was, is, and always will be a controversial figure. Though his rise from Bedouin nomad to ruler of Libya is impressive, many of the things he did while in control of the country were unquestionably authoritarian and criminal. However, Gaddafi began as a sort of liberator. He joined the Libyan military in the…

Review of From Urbanization to Cities: The Politics of Democratic Municipalism by Murray Bookchin From Urbanization to Cities The Politics of Democratic Municipalism by Murray Bookchin (AK Press, 2021)  In this updated version of the late Murray Bookchin’s initial 1987 title The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, now with an introduction by…

Partition & Entanglement: Review of Home Rule by Nandita Sharma “The entire, eons-long practice of human  movement  into  new  places  was  pushed  out  of  our  imagination — or,  perhaps more accurately, was reimagined as a national security threat. In the process, stasis was glorified as the normative way of being human.” “Only after the death…

Recent years have seen a resurrection of a Great Man Of History Marxist scholasticism that fixates on some (easily accessible) Original Core Texts of supposed genius and discards all the complicated stuff afterwards, certainly everything in recent decades. This impulse is the product of a mass flocking to radical leftism wherein new recruits have little…

Business as a System of Power (1943) serves as both a great piece of economic history and comparative economics, and as an exploration of timeless principles and observations on the nature and political economy of business power. Robert A. Brady’s extremely informative study establishes how business communities from around the industrialized world began, and continued,…

Eric Laursen. The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State. Foreword by Maia Ramnath (AK Press, 2021). Much of the ground Laursen covers in this book is already familiar to most anarchists. He does an adequate job, or better, at all of it. His treatment of the ideological hegemony of the state is…