Popular Education for a Free Society
This article originally appeared in the October 2001 issue of Direct Democracy, a publication of Demokratisk Alternativ. For many people involved in the worldwide struggle against capitalism, the past two years had seemed, for once, to offer some promise of progress toward a freer society. History appeared to be taking a rare turn in our …
In August 1999, just a few months before the newly invigorated anti-capitalist movement scored a provisional victory in Seattle, an unemployed white supremacist named Buford Furrow shot a group of children at a Jewish preschool in Los Angeles. Furrow went on to kill an Asian-American mail carrier before turning himself in. This murderous outburst happened …
Because too much thinking, unwavering autonomy, makes conforming to the administered world difficult and causes suffering, countless people project this suffering, which is in fact socially dictated, onto reason as such. Reason is supposed to have brought suffering and disaster into the world. The dialectic of enlightenment, which must indeed name the price of progress, …
Continue reading “Redeeming Reason: Domination and Reconciliation in Dialectic of Enlightenment”
(this article co-written with Jay Driskell) Note: This piece was originally written in 1997, before Seattle and the re-emergence of a radical grassroots international movement explicitly opposed to capitalism, at a time when anarchist and anticapitalist perspectives were still marginal within the movement against “globalization.” We’re reprinting it now because we think the ideas it …
Continue reading “From a Critique of Corporate Power to a Critique of Capitalism”
(This is an abridged version of the workshop I gave at the NASCO conference on cooperatives in Ann Arbor each November from 1997 to 2003. As I pointed out to the audience beforehand, my take on anarchism is a partisan one; there’s nothing “objective” about it, and many other anarchists would disagree with my presentation. …
(This article originally appeared in the North American Green journal Synthesis / Regeneration in 1997.) At the beginning of the decade the German Green Party was on the verge of collapse. Torn throughout the 1980’s by bitter internal struggles over basic questions of political direction, the party was entirely unprepared for the tumultuous events of …
Continue reading “The Political Decomposition of the German Greens”