Joshs Favored Current Staff Picks

From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power / Saul Newman

In this incredible book Newman uses post-structuralist thought to move past Marxism and push Anarchism to a deeper, more thorough critique of power and authority. He shows how it is important to shirk the essentialist logic of classical anarchism and redefine our limits and possibilities. A difficult but important theoretical read.

Victor Serge’s optimism and drive never ceases to amaze me, after watching everything he has spent everything working for slide into totalitarian Stalinism, he can still say things like “I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries and written 20 books. I own nothing, on several occasions a press with a vast circulation has thrown filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be done with this digression; those were the only roads possible for us. I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.” In spite of his time as a Bolshevik, Serge managed to avoid dogma and stay a free thinker through all sorts of hell. In his memoirs, he manages to do a fair job of defending his positions and paints a picture of revolution that has certainly forced me to question any idea I previously had of revolutionary tactics or society in the face of harsh reality and power hungry authoritarians.

Uhhh- pondering concepts such as rhizomatic thought, lines of flight, nomadic war machines, bodies without organs and becoming animal is like running headfirst into a brick wall, a strangely sublime brick wall.