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1917: Revolution in Russia and its Aftermath
Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Murray Bookchin, and Ida Mett
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress DK265.69.G65 2018 | Dewey Decimal 947.0841

Upon their scandalous deportation from the United States in 1919, famous anarchist writers and activists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were greeted like heroes by the new Bolshevik government in Russia. Berkman described it as “the most sublime day of my life.” And yet he would flee the country after only two years. Belarus-born Ida Mett, who went through a similar experience at the time, also wrote a harrowing account of the Red Army’s brutal massacre at the Kronstadt Uprising before she too went into exile. How did each of these figures become so deeply disillusioned with Russia so quickly? And why, within a few years, did they all leave the country forever?
 
1917 offers a unique alternative perspective on the early years of the Russian Revolution through the narrative perspective of these three eyewitnesses. Featuring an introduction by Murray Bookchin, this book emphasizes the rarely discussed anarchist hopes for a democratic October revolution, while also critiquing the increasingly authoritarian responses of Bolshevik leaders at the time. Published for the centennial of the Russian revolutions, 1917 contains four essays by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Ida Mett, and Bookchin, as well as a poem by Dan Georgakas, that analyze, assess, celebrate, and bemoan both the wild successes and the bitter failures of the revolution. 
 
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1968: On the Edge of World Revolution
Edited by Philipp Gassert and Martin Klimke
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress D848.A1934 2018

It was a year of seismic social and political change. With the wildfire of uprisings and revolutions that shook governments and halted economies in 1968, the world would never be the same again. Restless students, workers, women, and national liberation movements arose as a fierce global community with radically democratic instincts that challenged war, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy with unprecedented audacity. Fast forward fifty years and 1968 has become a powerful myth that lingers in our memory.
 
Released for the fiftieth anniversary of that momentous year, this second edition of Philipp Gassert’s and Martin Klimke’s seminal 1968 presents an extremely wide ranging survey across the world. Short chapters, written by local eye-witnesses and historical experts, cover the tectonic events in thirty-nine countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East to give a truly global view. Included are forty photographs throughout the book that illustrate the drama of events described in each chapter. This edition also has the transcript of a panel discussion organized for the fortieth anniversary of 1968 with eyewitnesses Norman Birnbaum, Patty Lee Parmalee, and Tom Hayden and moderated by the book's editors.
 
Visually engaging and comprehensive, this new edition is an extremely accessible introduction to a vital moment of global activism in humanity’s history, perfect for a high school or early university textbook, a resource for the general reader, or a starting point for researchers. 
 
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1984 And After
Roussopoulos Hewitt
Black Rose Books, 1987
Library of Congress CB161.A168 1984 | Dewey Decimal 303.4909048

Advancing Urban Rights: Equality and Diversity in the City
Edited by Eva Garcia-Checua and Lorenzo Vidal
Black Rose Books, 2021 Dewey Decimal 307.76

How can the set of rights that underpin the notion of the “right to the city” be advanced? In seeking answers to this question over several decades, social mobilizations have been assembled and new political and legal frameworks promoted. New interpretations and political articulations of the right to the city, especially those that have emerged since the end of the 2000s, encourage us to view it through the lens of identity politics. They propose that attention should be given to the diversity of the social groups that live in urban environments, whose voice and agency must be recognized in the construction of the city in the interests of equality and social justice.
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Addressing these issues not only involves recognizing and valuing the subjects that have historically been marginalized in the construction of urban space, both physical and symbolic. It also means bearing in mind that the city materializes and is experienced in a different way by the different groups that inhabit it through their practices, uses of it and, in short, how their daily life takes shape. Advancing Urban Rights will help both concerned citizens and policy makers identify and analyze redistribution and recognition policies, institutional change, and social production of the city in an increasingly urban world.
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Against Nihilism: Nietzsche meets Dostoevsky
Maia Johnson-Stepenberg
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress B3318.N54S74 2019

Described by Thomas Mann as “brothers in spirit, but tragically grotesque companions in misfortune,” Nietzsche and Dostoevsky remain towering figures in the intellectual development of European modernity. Maia Johnson-Stepenberg’s accessible new introduction to these philosophers compares their writings on key topics such as criminality, Christianity, and the figure of the “outsider” to reveal the urgency and contemporary resonance of their shared struggle against nihilism. Against Nihilism also considers nihilism in the context of current political and social struggles, placing Nietzsche and Dostoevsky’s contributions at the heart of important contemporary debates regarding community, identity, and meaning. Inspired by class discussions with her students and aimed at first-team readers of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Against Nihilism provides an accessible, unique comparative study of these two key thinkers. 
 
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Anarchism Volume One: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One – From Anarchy to Anarchism
Edited by Robert Graham
Black Rose Books, 2005
Library of Congress HX826.A47 2005 | Dewey Decimal 335.83

Click here for orders in the UK & Europe.

Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas is a comprehensive and far-ranging collection of anarchist writings from the classical era to 1939. Edited and introduced by noted anarchist scholar Robert Graham, this incomparable volume includes the definitive texts from the anarchist tradition of political thought. It deals both with the positive ideas and proposals the anarchists tried to put into practice and with their critiques of the authoritarian theories and practices confronting them.

ROBERT GRAHAM has written extensively on the history of anarchist ideas. He is the author of "The Role of Contract in Anarchist Ideology," in For Anarchism, edited by David Goodway, and he wrote the introduction to the 1989 edition of Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, originally published in 1851. He has been doing research and writing on the historical development of anarchist ideas for over 20 years and is a well respected commentator in the field.

"Robert Graham is an outstanding scholar of anarchism and has made an exceptionally stimulating choice of texts: some familiar, others--especially those from East Asia--entirely unknown to me. The publication of this first instalment of what promises to be a notable anthology is an important event for anarchists." - David Goodway, Anarchist Historian, University of Leeds, UK

"Will definitely meet the need for a comprehensive study of all the strands, ideas and themes of anarchist and libertarian thought." - Stuart Christie, Anarchist Writer/Publisher

"An excellent and long-overdue anthology of anarchist writings. It shows the depth, diversity and relevance of anarchist thought and action. Highly recommended." - Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

"This judicious collection is admirable in its chronological, geographical, and thematic range. There is nothing comparable in presenting anarchist and libertarian responses both to the challenges of theory and to those of practices forged in the fires of historical crises." - Wayne Thorpe, The Workers Themselves: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913-1923

"Admirably displays the range and inventiveness of anarchist approaches." - Colin Ward, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction and Anarchy in Action


Table of Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1: EARLY TEXTS ON SERVITUDE AND FREEDOM

1. Bao Jingyan: Neither Lord Nor Subject (300 C.E.)

2. Etienne de la Boetie: On Voluntary Servitude (1552)

3. Gerrard Winstanley: The New Law of Righteousness (1649)

CHAPTER 2: ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTION

4. William Godwin: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793-97)

5. Jean Varlet: The Explosion (1794)

6. Sylvain Maréchal: Manifesto of the Equals (1796)

CHAPTER 3: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIALISM

7. Charles Fourier: Attractive Labour (1822-37)

8. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: What is Property (1840)

9. Proudhon: The System of Economic Contradictions (1846)

CHAPTER 4: REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS AND ACTION

10. Michael Bakunin, The Reaction in Germany (1842)

11. Max Stirner: The Ego and Its Own (1844)

12. Proudhon: The General Idea of the Revolution (1851)

13. Anselme Bellegarrigue: Anarchy is Order (1850)

14. Joseph Déjacque: The Revolutionary Question (1854)

15. Francisco Pi y Margall: Reaction and Revolution (1854)

16. Carlo Pisacane: On Revolution (1857)

17. Joseph Déjacque: On Being Human (1857)

CHAPTER 5: THE ORIGINS OF THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT AND THE INTERNATIONAL

18. Proudhon: On Federalism (1863/65)

19. Statutes of the First International (1864-1866)

20. Bakunin: Socialism and the State (1867)

21. Bakunin: Program of the International Brotherhood (1868)

22. Bakunin: What is the State (1869)

23. Bakunin: The Illusion of Universal Suffrage (1870)

24. Bakunin: On Science and Authority (1871)

CHAPTER 6: THE CONFLICT IN THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

25. Bakunin: The Organization of the International (1871)

26. The Sonvillier Circular (1871)

27. The St. Imier Congress (1872)

CHAPTER 7: THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND THE PARIS COMMUNE

28. Bakunin: Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis (1870)

29. Bakunin: The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (1871)

30. Louise Michel: In Defence of the Commune (1871)

31. Peter Kropotkin: The Paris Commune (1881)

CHAPTER 8: ANARCHIST COMMUNISM

32. Carlo Cafiero: Anarchy and Communism (1880)

33. Kropotkin: The Conquest of Bread (1892)

34. Kropotkin: Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898)

35. Luigi Galleani: The End of Anarchism (1907)

CHAPTER 9: ANARCHY AND ANARCHISM

36. José Llunas Pujols: What is Anarchy (1882)

37. Charlotte Wilson: Anarchism (1886)

38. Élisée Reclus: Anarchy (1894)

39. Jean Grave: Moribund Society and Anarchy (1893)

40. Gustav Landauer: Anarchism in Germany (1895)

41. Kropotkin: On Anarchism (1896)

42. E. Armand: Mini-Manual of the Anarchist Individualist (1911)

CHAPTER 10: PROPAGANDA BY THE DEED

43. Paul Brousse: Propaganda By the Deed (1877)

44. Carlo Cafiero: Action (1880)

45. Kropotkin: Expropriation (1885)

46. Jean Grave: Means and Ends (1893)

47. Leo Tolstoy: On Non-violent Resistance (1900)

48. Errico Malatesta: Violence as a Social Factor (1895)

49. Gustav Landauer: Destroying the State by Creating Socialism (1910/15)

50. Voltairine de Cleyre: Direct Action (1912)

CHAPTER 11: LAW AND MORALITY

51. William Godwin: Of Law (1797)

52. Kropotkin: Law and Authority (1886)

53. Errico Malatesta: The Duties of the Present Hour (1894)

54. Kropotkin: Mutual Aid (1902) and Anarchist Morality (1890)

CHAPTER 12: ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

55. The Pittsburgh Proclamation (1883)

56. Fernand Pelloutier: Anarchism and the Workers' Unions (1895)

57. Antonio Pellicer Paraire: The Organization of Labour (1900)

58. The Workers' Federation of the Uruguayan Region (FORU): Declarations from the 3rd Congress (1911)

59. Emma Goldman: On Syndicalism (1913)

60. Pierre Monatte and Errico Malatesta: Syndicalism - For and Against (1907)

CHAPTER 13: ART AND ANARCHY

61. Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

62. Bernard Lazare: Anarchy and Literature (1894)

63. Jean Grave: The Artist as Equal, Not Master (1899)

CHAPTER 14: ANARCHY AND EDUCATION

64. Bakunin: Integral Education (1869)

65. Francisco Ferrer: The Modern School (1908)

66. Sébastien Faure: Libertarian Education (1910)

CHAPTER 15: WOMEN, LOVE AND MARRIAGE

67. Bakunin: Against Patriarchal Authority (1873)

68. Louise Michel: Women's Rights (1886)

69. Carmen Lareva: Free Love (1896)

70. Emma Goldman: Marriage (1897), Prostitution and Love (1910)

CHAPTER 16: THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

71. Voltairine de Cleyre: The Mexican Revolution (1911)

72. Praxedis Guerrero: To Die On Your Feet (1910)

73. Ricardo Flores Magón: Land and Liberty (1911-1918)

CHAPTER 17: WAR AND REVOLUTION IN EUROPE

74. Élisée Reclus: Evolution and Revolution (1891)

75. Tolstoy: Compulsory Military Service (1893)

76. Jean Grave: Against Militarism and Colonialism (1893)

77. Élisée Reclus: The Modern State (1905)

78. Otto Gross: Overcoming Cultural Crisis (1913)

79. Gustav Landauer: For Socialism (1911)

80. Malatesta: Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles (1914)

81. International Anarchist Manifesto Against War (1915)

82. Emma Goldman: The Road to Universal Slaughter (1915)

CHAPTER 18: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

83. Gregory Maksimov: The Soviets (1917)

84. All-Russian Conference of Anarcho-Syndicalists: Resolution on Trade Unions and Factory Committees (1918)

85. Manifestos of the Makhnovist Movement (1920)

86. Peter Arshinov: The Makhnovshchina and Anarchism (1921)

87. Voline: The Unknown Revolution (1947)

88. Alexander Berkman: The Bolshevik Myth (1925)

89. Emma Goldman: The Transvaluation of Values (1923)

CHAPTER 19: ANARCHISM IN LATIN AMERICA

90. Comrades of the Chaco: Anarchist Manifesto (1892)

91. Manuel González Prada: Our Indians (1904)

92. Rafael Barrett: Striving for Anarchism (1909/10)

93. Teodoro Antilli: Class Struggle and Social Struggle (1924)

94. López Arango and Abad de Santillán: Anarchism in the Labour Movement (1925)

95. The American Continental Workers' Association (1929)

CHAPTER 20: CHINESE ANARCHISM

96. He Zhen: Women's Liberation (1907)

97. Chu Minyi: Universal Revolution (1907)

98. Wu Zhihui: Education as Revolution (1908)

99. Shifu: Goals and Methods of the Anarchist-Communist Party (1914)

100. Huang Lingshuang: Writings on Evolution, Freedom and Marxism (1917-29)

101. Li Pei Kan (Ba Jin): On Theory and Practice (1921-1927)

CHAPTER 21: ANARCHISM IN JAPAN AND KOREA

102. Kôtoku Shûsui: Letter from Prison (1910)

103. Ôsugi Sakae: Social Idealism (1920)

104. Itô Noe: The Facts of Anarchy (1921)

105. Shin Chaeho: Declaration of the Korean Revolution (1923)

106. Hatta Shûzô: On Syndicalism (1927)

107. Kubo Yuzuru: On Class Struggle and the Daily Struggle (1928)

108. The Talhwan: What We Advocate (1928)

109. Takamure Itsue: A Vision of Anarchist Love (1930)

110. Japanese Libertarian Federation: What To Do About War (1931)

CHAPTER 22: THE INTERWAR YEARS

111. Gustav Landauer: Revolution of the Spirit (1919)

112. Errico Malatesta: An Anarchist Program (1920)

113. Luigi Fabbri: Fascism: The Preventive Counter-Revolution (1921)

114. The IWA: Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922)

115. The Platform and its Critics (1926-27)

116. Voline: Anarchist Synthesis

117. Alexander Berkman: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1927)

118. Marcus Graham: Against the Machine (1934)

119. Wilhelm Reich and the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1935)

120. Bart de Ligt: The Conquest of Violence (1937)

121. Rudolf Rocker: Nationalism and Culture (1937)

CHAPTER 23: THE SPANISH REVOLUTION

122. Félix Martí Ibáñez: The Sexual Revolution (1934)

123. Lucía Sánchez Saornil: The Question of Feminism (1935)

124. The CNT: Resolutions from the Zaragoza Congress (1936)

125. Diego Abad de Santillán: The Libertarian Revolution (1937)

126. Gaston Leval: Libertarian Democracy

127. Albert Jensen: The CNT-FAI, the State and Government (1938)

128. Diego Abad de Santillán: A Return to Principle (1938)

CHAPTER 24: EPILOGUE AND PROLOGUE TO VOLUME 2

129. Emma Goldman: A Life Worth Living (1934)

130. Herbert Read: Poetry and Anarchism (1938)

131. Malatesta: Toward Anarchy

2005: 536 pages, bibliography and index
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Anarchism Volume Two: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume Two – The Emergence of a New Anarchism
Edited by Robert Graham
Black Rose Books, 2007

Continuing where Volume One left off,this anthology of anarchist writings, broad in its geographical and intellectual scope, documents both continuity and change in anarchist ideas since the Spanish revolution and civil war. Topics covered include anti-capitalism and global justice movements, opposition to war, ecology and anarchism, the relevance of syndicalism, libertarian communism, anarcha-feminism, personal and sexual liberation, libertarian education, participatory democracy, direct action and affinity groups, technology and freedom, anthropology and anarchy,art and the utopian imagination, bureaucracy, state and empire, resistance and revolution, post-modernism, and philosophical anarchism.

In addition to English language material from England and North America, the book includes translations from Africa, India, China, Latin America, and Europe, much of which has never appeared before in English. Contributors include Noam Chomsky, Murray Bookchin,Emma Goldman, George Woodcock, Marie Louise Berneri, Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Martin Buber, Paul Goodman, Carole Pateman, Colin Ward, Paul Feyerabend, Pierre Clastres, Chaia Heller, Ivan Illich, Daniel Guerin, Luce Fabbri and many more.

ROBERT GRAHAM has been writing on the history of anarchist ideas and contemporary anarchist theory for over 20 years.In 2005, he published Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism 300CE to 1939(Black Rose Books)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF ANARCHISM by Davide Turcato

CHAPTER 1: ANTI-MILITARISM, WAR & REVOLUTION

1. Herbert Read: The Philosophy of Anarchism (1940)
2. Emma Goldman: The Individual, Society and the State (1940)
3. The Romande Anarchist Federation: Coming to Grips With War (1939)
4. Marie Louise Berneri: Constructive Policy versus Destructive War (1940-43)
5. Jean Sauliere, Voline et. al.: Appeal to All Workers (1943)
6. Italian Anarchist Federation: Act for Yourselves (1945)
7. Bulgarian Anarchist Manifesto (1945)
8. French Anarchist Federation: The Issues of the Day (1945)
9. Korean Anarchist Manifesto (1948)
10. International Anarchist Manifesto (1948)
11. Paul Goodman: Drawing the Line (1945)
12. Alex Comfort: Peace and Disobedience (1946)
13. Dwight Macdonald: The Root Is Man (1946)

CHAPTER 2: THE WILL TO DREAM

14. Ethel Mannin:The Will to Dream (1944)
15. Marie Louis Berneri: Journey Through Utopia (1949)
16. Martin Buber: Paths in Utopia (1949)
17. Paul & Percival Goodman: Communities (1947)
18. Giancarlo de Carlo: Rebuilding Community (1948)

CHAPTER 3: ART AND FREEDOM

19. Herbert Read:The Freedom of the Artist (1943)
20. Alex Comfort: Art and Social Responsibility (1946)
21. Holley Cantine: Art: Play and Its Perversions (1947)
22. Paul-Émile Borduas: Global Refusal (1948)
23. André Breton: The Black Mirror of Anarchism (1952)
24. Julian Beck: Storming the Barricades (1964)
25. Living Theatre Declaration (1970)

CHAPTER 4: RESISTING THE NATION STATE

26. Alex Comfort:Authority and Delinquency (1950)
27. Geoffrey Ostergaard: The Managerial Revolution (1954)
28. Mohamed Saïl: The Kabyle Mind-Set (1951)
29. Maurice Fayolle: From Tunis to Casablanca (1954)
30. André Prudhommeaux: The Libertarians and Politics (1954)
31. Noir et Rouge: Refusing the Nation-State (1957-62)
32. Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakesh Narayan: From Socialism to Sarvodaya (1957)
33. Vernon Richards: Banning the Bomb (1958-59)
34. Nicolas Walter: Direct Action and the New Pacifism (1962)
35. Paul Goodman: "Getting into Power" (1962)

CHAPTER 5: CREATING A COUNTER-CULTURE

36. Herbert Read:Anarchism and Education (1944-47)
37. Paul Goodman: A Public Dream of Universal Disaster
38. L'Impulso: Resistance or Revolution (1950)
39. David Thoreau Wieck: The Realization of Freedom (1953)
40. David Dellinger: Communalism (1954)
41. A.J. Baker: Anarchism Without Ends (1960)
42: Gary Snyder: Buddhist Anarchism (1961)
43. Nicolas Walter: Anarchism and Religion (1991)
44. C. George Benello: Wasteland Culture (1967)
45. Louis Mercier Vega: Yesterday's Societies and Today's (1970)
46. Joel Spring: Liberating Education (1975)

CHAPTER 6: RESURGENT ANARCHISM

47. Lain Diez:Towards a Systematization of Anarchist Thought (1964)
48. Murray Bookchin: Ecology and Anarchy (1965)
49. Daniel Guérin: Anarchism Reconsidered (1965-66)
50. The Provos: PROVOcation (1966)
51. The Cohn-Bendit Brothers: It Is for Yourself that You Make the Revolution(1968)
52. Jacobo Prince: Fighting for Freedom (1969)
53. Diego Abad de Santillán: Anarchism Without Adjectives (1969)
54. Nicolas Walter: About Anarchism (1969)
55. Noam Chomsky: Notes on Anarchism (1970)
56. Robert Paul Wolff: In Defence of Anarchism (1970)
57. Paul Goodman: Freedom and Autonomy (1972)

CHAPTER 7: FORMS OF FREEDOM

58. Philip Sansom:Syndicalism Restated (1951)
59. Benjamin Péret: The Factory Committee (1952)
60. Comunidad del Sur: The Production of Self-Management (1969)
61. Maurice Joyeaux: Self-Management, Syndicalism and Factory Councils (1973)
62. Murray Bookchin: The Forms of Freedom (1968)
63. Colin Ward: Anarchy as a Theory of Organization (1966-1973)

CHAPTER 8: SOCIETY AGAINST STATE

64. Pierre Clasters:Society Against the State (1974)
65. Michael Taylor: Anarchy, the State and Cooperation (1976)
66. Louis Mercier Vega: The Modern State (1970)
67. Nico Berti: The New Masters (1976)
68. Noam Chomsky: Intellectuals and the State (1977)

CHAPTER 9: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

69. George Woodcock:The Tyranny of the Clock (1944)
70. Paul Goodman: Science and Technology (1960)
71. Paul Feyerabend: Against Method (1975)
72. Richard Kostelanetx: Technoanarchism (1968)
73. Ivan Illich: Political Inversion (1976)
74: Murray Bookchin: Ecotechnology and Ecocommunities (1976-82)

CHAPTER 10: SEXUAL REVOLUTION

75. Marie Louise Berneri: Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Revolution (1945)
76. Daniel Guérin: Sexual Liberation
77. Paul Goodman: The Politics of Being Queer (1969)
78. Peggy Kornegger: Anarchism: The Feminist Connection (1975)
79. Carol Ehrlich: Anarchism, Feminism and Situationism (1977)

535 pages, bibliography, index
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Anarchist Collectives
Sam Dolgoff
Black Rose Books, 1973
Library of Congress HX925.A515 1990 | Dewey Decimal 335.946

The Anarchist Collectives reveals a very different understanding of the nature of radical social change and the means of achieving it.

Sam Dolgoff, editor of the best anthology of Bakunin’s writings, has now produced an excellent documentary history of the Anarchist collective in Spain. Although there is a vast literature on the Spanish Civil War, this is the first book in English that is devoted to the experiments in workers’ self-management, both urban and rural, which constituted one of the most remarkable social revolutions in modern history. - Paul Avrich

The eyewitness reports and commentary presented in this highly important study reveal a different understanding of the nature of socialism and the means for achieving it. - Noam Chomsky

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Murray Bookchin

Part One: Background

1. The Spanish Revolution
The Two Revolutions
The Trend Towards Workers’ Self-Management

2. The Libertarian Tradition
The Rural Collectivist Tradition
The Anarchist Influence
The Political and Economic Organization of Society

3. Historical Notes
The Prologue to Revolution
The Counter-Revolution and the Destruction of the Collectives

4. The Limitations of the Revolution

Part Two: The Social Revolution

5. The Economics of Revolution

Economic Structure and Coordination
A Note on the Difficult Problems of Reconstruction
Money and Exchange

6. Workers’ Self-Management in Industry

7. Urban Collectivization
Collectivization in Catalonia
The Collectivization of the Metal and Munitions Industry
The Collectivization of the Optical Industry
The Socialization of Health Services
Industrial Collectivization in Alcoy
Control of Industries in the North

8. The Revolution of the Land

9. The Coordination of Collectives
The Peasant Federation of Levant
The Aragon Federation of Collectives: The First Congress

10. The Rural Collectives
A Journey Through Aragon
The Collectivization in Graus
Libertarian Communism in Alcora
The Collective in Binefar
Miralcampo and Azuqueca
Collectivization in Carcagente
Collectivization in Magdalena de Pulpis
The Collective in Mas de Las Matas

11. An Evaluation of the Anarchist Collectives
The Characteristics of the Libertarian Collectives

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Appendix
Photographs and Posters
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The Anatomist of Power: Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority
Costas Despiniadis
Black Rose Books, 2018

Few twentieth-century writers remain as potent as Franz Kafka—one of the rare figures to maintain both a major presence in the academy and on the shelves of general readers. Yet, remarkably, no work has yet fully focused on his politics and anti-authoritarian sensibilities. The Anatomist of Power: Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority is a fascinating new look at his widely known novels and stories (including The Trial, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Amerika), portraying him as a powerful critic of authority, bureaucracy, capitalism, law, patriarchy, and prisons. Making deft use of Kafka’s diaries, his friends’ memoirs, and his original sketches, Costas Despiniadis addresses his active participation in Prague’s anarchist circles, his wide interest in anarchist authors, his skepticism about the Russian Revolution, and his ambivalent relationship with utopian Zionism. The portrait of Kafka that emerges is striking and fresh—rife with insights and a refusal to accept the structures of power that dominated his society.
 
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Another City is Possible with Participatory Budgeting
Yves Cabannes
Black Rose Books, 2018

Participatory budgeting gives people real power to determine the future of their cities. It’s a democratic process where ordinary community members directly decide how to spend the public budget. It explicitly reaffirms the central place of collective deliberation for participatory democracy, and it also can contribute to the transformation of the city into urban commons. Though participatory budgeting was only born in 1989, it has since been practiced more than 2000 times in more than 45 countries around the world—groundbreaking success for a process that is one of the rare authentic democratic innovations in the past 30 years.
 
In this book, Yves Cabannes offers examples from five continents of participatory budgeting in practice, outlining the successes and challenges of thirteen case studies from the United States, Brazil, France, Portugal, Spain, China, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mozambique, and Cameroon. As much a best-of-guide as a how-to-manual for democratizing municipal finances, the book charts the unique trajectory of participatory budgeting, asserting its rich potential for realizing radical democratic goals and deepening democracy. The book also features a foreword by Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, the city with the largest and most ambitious participatory budget in history.
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Anthropology and Dialectical Naturalism: A Philosophical Manifesto
Brian Morris
Black Rose Books, 2020

Is the world just a cultural construct where people create their own realities? In this illuminating and wide-ranging philosophical treatise, Brian Morris critiques broad swathes of recent theory as he seeks to reclaim anthropology as a historical social science. He achieves this by grounding it within a metaphysic of “dialectical naturalism” or “evolutionary realism”—a tradition long ignored by academic philosophy. 
 
After reviewing the anthropological background of this worldview—the Greeks and the Enlightenment—Morris explores two essential themes. First, he critically assesses the main forms of dialectical naturalism, including Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Marx’s historical materialism, and the hylorealism of the philosopher-scientist Mario Bunge. Second, he offers a strong plea to retain the dual heritage of anthropology as a historical science that combines both humanism and naturalism. A powerful philosophical manifesto, the book cogently upholds dialectical naturalism as the most grounding philosophy for anthropology and the social sciences.
 
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Art, Space, Ecology: Two Views-Twenty Interviews
John K. Grande
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress N7560.G76 2019 | Dewey Decimal 701

In Art, Space, Ecology, internationally renowned curator and critic John K. Grande interviews twenty major contemporary artists whose works engage with the natural environment. Whether their medium is sculpture, nature interventions, performance, body art, or installation, these discussions, complemented by eighty stunning photographs, reveal the artists’ diverse backgrounds and methods, expressions and realizations.Ultimately, the natural world serves as a canvas to explore the intersections of art, space, and the environment, thereby raising questions about our relationship with landscape itself. The essence of the art form is a dynamic interactivity, and the dialogues between Grande and the artists mirror the encounter of object and environment, artist and audience, society and nature.  This work is rounded out with an engaging introduction by writer and curator Edward Lucie-Smith, who sets the stage for some of the most insightful and compelling discussions on art to be found. 
 
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Bakunin: Philosophy of Freedom
Brian Morris
Black Rose Books, 1993
Library of Congress HX914.7.B34M67 1993

Balance Art & Nature Revised Edition
John K. Grande
Black Rose Books, 2003 Dewey Decimal 153.35

Believing that artistic expression can and does play an important role in changing the way we perceive our relation to the world we live in, art critic John Grande takes an in-depth look at the work of some very unusual environmental artists in the United States, Canada, and -Europe. Dealing with everything from materials to the politics of curatorship, from the permanence of art works to the artist's role as cultural critic, Balance Art and Nature takes theory into action as it critically examines the works of Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Armand Vaillancourt, Bill Reid, Carl Beam, Kevin Kelly, Ana Mendieta, James Carl, Patrick Dougherty, Keith Haring, and others. What emerges is a viable socio-environmental framework for evaluating contemporary art and insights into art's actual and potential roles. "Grande's commentaries represent an important contribution to the theory of art."--Claude Levi-Strauss "A call to reawaken creativity in this time of alienation."--Antony Gormley "Encourages us to rethink what it means to be an artist in a time of global eco-crisis."--Suzi Gablik, The Re-enchantment of Art "Makes unexpected connections giving new insights into contemporary art."--Public Art Review "Grande's book contains a lot of ideas, all of which are thought-provoking."--Globe and Mail "Details makes this book convincing."--Books In Canada "Grande's ideas and style are fresh, sincere, intuitive, lively and compelling."--Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics "Offers interesting parallels between different aspects of public art."--Espace Sculptur Writer and art critic John Grande's reviews and feature -articles have been published in art magazines and catalogues internationally. He is author of Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books), Nils-Udo: Art with Nature (Wienand Verlag), and Art Nature Dialogues (SUNY Press).

Library of Congress subject headings for this publication:
Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Art, Modern -- 20th century.
Nature (Aesthetics)
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Buzz Kill: The Corporatization of Cannabis
Michael R. Devillaer
Black Rose Books, 2023

A wide-ranging exploration of the legalization of cannabis in Canada and what we can learn from it.

Cronyism, greed, and corruption trumped social justice and public health in Canada’s legalization of cannabis. How did we get here? Where are we going? More humane drug policy—which prioritizes public health over corporate profits—is possible. Canada legalized the sale of recreational cannabis in 2018. Buzz Kill recounts the political and corporate collusion in creating an industry out of thin air that supplanted an illicit century-old industry. Drawing on lessons from alcohol and tobacco regulation in Canada and the United States, this book shows that, rather than basing policy choices on evidence, Canada’s political elites created a new regulated industry that would line their own pockets.
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A Citizen's Guide to City Politics: Montreal
Edited by Eric Shragge, Jason Prince, and Mostafa Henaway
Black Rose Books, 2021
Library of Congress JS1761.7.A15M66 2021 | Dewey Decimal 323.0420971428

From Montreal’s grassroots activists, city planners, and engaged citizens, a guide to building radical municipal power from the ground up.

World cities face persistent tension between the pull of globalization and the needs of citizens. Conventional political parties present milquetoast solutions that accommodate the interests of business. Meanwhile, citizens in cafes, meeting halls, on the streets, and now in virtual forums are rising to the challenge of imagining new and radical municipal policy from the ground up. This book explores the future of Montreal’s citizen lead movements at a moment defined by the threats of pandemic, austerity, housing speculation and insecurity, and racism. It pairs contemporary analysis with an exploration of Montreal’s rich municipal history. The editors of A Citizen’s Guide to City Politics gathered more than twenty activists, urban planners, and thinkers to address the major problems facing Montrealers and propose alternatives from a citizen's perspective. Municipal movements everywhere will see their own struggles reflected in this guide and will find inspiration for debate and action.
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Close of Play: President, Prince, and Cricket
William Walcott
Black Rose Books, 2019
Library of Congress E891.5.O332W35 2020

In this allegorical excursion, William Walcott explores the intersections between United States politics and the game of cricket in a book reminiscent of C. L. R. James’s classic Beyond a Boundary. In Close of Play, Walcott highlights the careers of former US president Barack Obama and the Trinidadian cricket and cultural phenom Brian Lara—one of the greatest batsmen of all time, who Obama once called “the Michael Jordan of cricket.” Readers are invited to explore the parallel poetics of politics and sport through the life and words of these luminaries, both of whom promised to deliver far-reaching social change yet found themselves “on the back foot.”
 
In his analysis, Walcott delves into matters of Caribbean and American identity, political leadership, oratory, and the blending of cricket vocabulary into political commentary. He also challenges us to understand the sociological links between international sport, socio-economic inequality, and racial politics. This book is a fascinating journey into the world of global sociopolitical life and the curiosities of language embedded in cricket and political play, both of which constitute enormous sectors within a multibillion dollar “sticky wicket” of transnational capitalism.
 
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Common Futures: Social Transformation and Political Ecology
Yavor Tarinski and Alexandros Schismenos
Black Rose Books, 2021
Library of Congress HM883.T374 2021 | Dewey Decimal 303.484

What does the future hold? Is the desertification of the planet, driven by state and corporate authority, the final horizon of history? Is the dystopian future implied by the systemic degradation of nature and society inescapable? From marginal activist groups to governments and interstate organizations, all appear to be concerned with what the future of our shared world will look like. Yet even amid the ongoing global crisis caused by capitalism, the potential of a different, radically rooted future has also appeared.
 
Common Futures explores the global emergence of twenty-first-century social movements, opposed to capitalism and state authority. These movements, Yavor Tarinski and Alexandros Schismenos show, transcend traditional political forms of organization and try to form autonomous networks premised on direct democracy and solidarity. The authors identify the importance of grassroots movements, which can bring radical change and create a more democratic and ecological future.

Common Futures examines the social and political roots of the environmental crisis and the relationship between ecology and direct democracy. But Tarinski and Schismenos go beyond the analysis of crises, contemporary struggles, and social movements: Common Futures also clarifies the conditions for the re-creation of free public time and space and point to practical steps that we can take to alleviate the problems of our future.
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The Conquest of Bread
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1990

The Conquest of Bread presents the clearest statement of Kropotkin’s anarchist social doctrines. It possesses a lucidity of style not often found in books on social themes. In Kropotkin’s own description, the book is “a study of the needs of humanity, and the economic means to satisfy them”. Taking the Paris Commune as its model, its paramount aim is to show how a social revolution can be made and how a society, organized on libertarian lines, can then be built on the ruins of the old. Form Stirner’s individualism, Proudhon’s mutualism and Bakunin’s collectivism Kropotkin proceeded to the principle of “anarchist communism”, by which private property and inequality of income would give way to the free distribution of goods and services. In summing up his beliefs he said, “The anarchists conceive a society in which all the mutual relations of its members are regulated… by mutual agreements between the members of the society and by a sum of social customs and habits…continually developing and continually readjusting in accordance with the ever-growing requirements of a free life stimulated by the progress of science, invention and the steady growth of higher ideals.”  In his introduction, George Woodcock throws a modern light on the significance and scope of Kropotkin’s work.
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The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective
Sam Dolgoff
Black Rose Books, 1976
Library of Congress F1788.D58 | Dewey Decimal 972.91063

Sam Dolgoff analyzes the Cuban Revolution.  He presents a historical perspective that arrives at new insights into social and political change. Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990) played an important role in anarchist movements since the early 1920s. He was a member of the Chicago Free Society Group, and co-founded the New York Libertarian League.
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The Curious One: Peter Kropotkin's Siberian Diaries
Edited by Christopher Coquard
Black Rose Books, 2021

Peter Kropotkin was one of the most influential Russian thinkers and activists and, though born a prince, is considered the architect of anarcho-communism. The year 2021 will mark the centennial of Kropotkin’s death, which this book commemorates through the first-ever English edition of his Siberian diaries.

Aged nineteen and freshly graduated at the top of his class from a prestigious military academy, Kropotkin decided to be posted to the distant backwater of Siberia, to the shock of his friends and family. There, he idealistically pursued political reforms and also participated in various ground-breaking geographic surveys, keeping a diary that recorded his experiences. Ten years later, after tenuously living a double life in the royal court and radical circles, the Tsarist Secret Police arrested him in St. Petersburg and seized his papers, including these Siberian diaries. This arrest, and his dramatic escape from prison, would spark the beginning of his reputation as one of the most famous anarchists ever. He would then spend forty years in exile before returning to revolutionary Russia where he would become increasingly critical of the Bolsheviks.

First published posthumously in 1923 in Russia, Kropotkin’s Siberian diaries take us on his five-year journey from St. Petersburg to Siberia, via Moscow, Kaluga, Chita, and Irkutsk. These pages, published here for the first time in English, immerse us in Kropotkin’s development as a brilliant scientist as he explored almost impassable terrain while also giving us a clear picture of his early political and philosophical thinking at a crucial moment in Russian history.
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Decentralizing Power: Paul Goodman's Social Criticism
Taylor Stoehr
Black Rose Books, 1994
Library of Congress HN65.D35 1994 | Dewey Decimal 306.0973

In this new collection of his most acute and durable political writing, readers will recognize the spirit of indignation and hope Goodman first roused in the 1960s with Growing Up Absurd. "Stoehr tells his [Goodman's] story well.This is the genuine kind of decentralism."--The Nation
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Direct Deliberative Democracy: How Citizens Can Rule
Jack Crittenden and Debra J. Campbell
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress JC423.C24946 2019 | Dewey Decimal 321.8

As American politics becomes ever more dominated by powerful vested interests, positive change seems permanently stymied. Left out in the cold by the political process, citizens are frustrated and despairing. How can we take back our democracy from the grip of oligarchy and bring power to the people?
 
In Direct Deliberative Democracy, Jack Crittenden and Debra Campbell offer up a better way for government to reflect citizens’ interests. It begins with a startlingly basic question: “Why don’t we the people govern?” In this provocative book, the authors mount a powerful case that the time has come for more direct democracy in the United States, showing that the circumstances that made the Constitutional framers’ arguments so convincing more than two hundred years ago have changed dramatically—and that our democracy needs to change with them. With money, lobbyists, and corporations now dominating local, state, and national elections, the authors argue that now is the time for citizens to take control of their government by deliberating together to make public policies and laws directly. At the heart of their approach is a proposal for a new system of “legislative juries,” in which the jury system would be used as a model for selecting citizens to create ballot initiatives. This would enable citizens to level the playing field, bring little-heard voices into the political arena, and begin the process of transforming our democracy into one that works for, not against, its citizens. 
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Durruti: The People Armed
Abel Paz
Black Rose Books, 1983
Library of Congress DP264.D87P3913 | Dewey Decimal 946.0810924

This book is the story of legendary Spanish revolutionary, and uncompromising anarchist, Buenaventura Durruti, as well as a history of the Spanish revolution.  
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Ecology Of Everyday Life
Chaia Heller
Black Rose Books, 1999

Ecology Of Freedom
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1990
Library of Congress CB19.B58 1991

Eduardo Galeano: Wind is the Breath of Time, the Storyteller’s Voice Travels On
Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy
Black Rose Books, 2019

Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano was an activist, visionary, and storyteller who began his hugely influential career with the publication of Open Veins of Latin America in 1971, which set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. After this success, Galeano’s writing became increasingly lyrical and inspired by the storytelling of South America’s Indigenous peoples, while remaining politically engaged and prophetic.
 
This book picks up where Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy’s previous book on Galeano left off, focusing on timely and urgent themes in the last four books he wrote in the twenty-first century. Through his distinctive narrative style of short vignettes—tightly packed explosive stories—Galeano explores what it means to live as mortal beings with a finite amount of time on the earth, waxing and waning between despair and hope. As a hunter of stories, Galeano’s yarns place us, as his listeners and agents of history, in a web where past and future come together to create a present full of possibility.
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Emma Goldman: Still Dangerous
C. Brid Nicholson
Black Rose Books, 2009

A symbol of working-class militancy and female revolt, Emma has been described as "the most dangerous woman in America." Emma Goldman's reputation during her lifetime was in part created by her incorrectly assumed connection with the assassination of President Mc Kinley, and by a young ambitious J. Edgar Hoover. After her death in 1940 it has been her biographers who have continued expanding Goldman's reputation, seeing her as "heroic" and "iconic," some have even gone so far as to describe her as a "cult figure."  To achieve a closer look at the many created versions of Goldman, this book uses visual and written sources to identify how Goldman was shown to the American public and to see literally how these images softened and changed over the years. 
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Enlightenment and Ecology: The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century
Edited by Yavor Tarinski
Black Rose Books, 2019
Library of Congress HM861.E55 2021

Throughout his life, prophetic American philosopher Murray Bookchin created social ecology as a comprehensive social program for the challenges of our present era. Through tireless teaching, speaking, organizing, and writing, Bookchin presented a humanist vision of ecology based on community, direct democracy, and the better promises of the Enlightenment, showing how we could transform our society into one that is free and egalitarian.
 
Enlightenment and Ecology is an international collection of commemorative essays by scholars and activists who have each incorporated the ideas of social ecology into their own work. This book also examines how the Kurdish freedom movement is using the Bookchin’s utopian ideas. In a time of urgent need for radical change, these essays provide both precious historical lessons and a transformative road map.
 
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Essays on Marx’s Theory Of Value
Isaac Rubin
Black Rose Books, 1973

Ethics: Origins and Development
Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1993
Library of Congress BJ76.K6913 1992 | Dewey Decimal 170.9

Ethics is the swan song of the great humanitarian scientist and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin. It constitutes, as it were, the crowning work and the resume of all his scientific, philosophical, and sociological views, at which he arrived in the course of his long and unusually rich life.   Starting with the moral principle in nature, to the moral conceptions of primitive peoples, Kropotkin traces the development of moral teachings from Ancient Greece, Christianity and the Middle Ages, through to the 19th century philosophers. In this way, Ethics gives answers to two fundamental problems of morality: its origin and historical development, and its goals and standards.   A realist and a revolutionist, Kropotkin regarded ethics not as an abstract science of human conduct, but as a concrete scientific discipline, whose object it was to inspire people in their practical activities. According to his theory, mutual aid, justice and self-sacrifice are the three elements of morality and these elements lie at the basis of human ethics. He held that ethics should be one and the same for all people – that no matter what class or party one might belong, we were all, first of all, human beings.   In his introduction, George Woodcock, a great humanitarian in his own right, describes the background from out of which Kropotkin was moved to write this unforgettable work. He introduces the reader, not only to the political and social climate, but also to the man and his innermost concerns.  Ethics is the 8th volume of The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin, published by Black Rose Books.
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Evolution And Environment
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1995
Library of Congress HX833.K744 1995 | Dewey Decimal 116

Edited with an Introduction by George Woodcock

The final volume of The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin gathers the many unpublished articles and essays written during his life-long and mostly ignored scientific career. His vision foresaw the more inter-relative and co-operative world that has become evident to us today in the 20th century.

Kropotkin the geographer had a social and political concern that transformed his interest in science into a larger ecological concern that outstripped the understanding of his contemporaries. He upheld the instinct of individuals to support one another, and acknowledged environmental influences on mutation and evolution. Whereas arguments at the time based all change on the drive for survival, Kropotkin's insight – now acknowledged by ecologists – insisted on the selective pressure of the environment and the importance of habitat.

Divided into two sections, “Modern Science and Anarchism” and “Thoughts On Evolution”, this volume illustrates the conjunction of science and anarchism in Kropotkin's life. The essays look to a wider of the world as environment together with human influence, rather than the strict Hegelian dialectical determinism of humanistically-influenced early Marxism.

George Woodcock (1912-1995) has published more than 140 titles on history, biography, philosophy, poetry and literary criticism. He has been called “a gentle anarchist in a state of grace”. Here, his introductions and prefaces help the reader appreciate Kropotkin's revolutionary insights and put the articles in their historical context, scientifically and politically.


Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Modern Science and Anarchism Preface by George Woodcock

1. The Origin of Anarchism

II. The Intellectual Movement of the Eighteenth Century

III. The Reaction at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

IV. Comtes Positive Philosophy

V. The Awakening in the Years 1856-1862

VI. Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy

VII. The Function of Law in Society

VIII. Place of Anarchism in Modern Society

IX. The Anarchist Ideal and the Preceding Revolutions

X. Anarchism

XI. A Few Conclusions of Anarchism

XII. The Means of Action

XIII. Conclusion

1995: 262 pages
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Faith In Faithlessness: An Anthology of Atheism
Edited by Dimitrios Roussopoulos
Black Rose Books, 2007

Asks freethinkers to declare their atheism in defiance of the stigmatization of disbelief.

With the rise of religious fundamentalism worldwide and a new 'spiritualism' in North America, expressed disbelief in God or gods has become a taboo once again in the Anglo-American world. In the last few years, however, atheism has witnessed a resurgence exemplified by the best-selling works of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Faith in Faithlessness is intended to contribute to the reassertion of the legitimacy of godlessness as a philosophical and moral stance. It is a unique anthology that presents a comprehensive selection of writings, by some of the world's most celebrated thinkers, past and present, who eloquently address the most significant questions concerning religious belief.

Included are essays by Benedict de Spinoza, Diderot, Paul-Henry Thiry D'Holbach, David Hume, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Stuart Mill, George Elliot, W.E.H. Lecky, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charles Bradlaugh, Anatole France, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert G. Ingersoll, Ludwig Feuerbach, Michael Bakunin, Karl Marx, Emma Goldman, H.L. Mencken, Clarence Darrow, Carl Van Doren, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Gore Vidal, Kai Nielsen, Christine Overall, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Michel Onfray, Elizabeth Second Anderson, Tariq Ali, Salman Rushdie, Kurt Vonnegut. Also included are other celebrity atheists and a major resource guide.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

FROM THE EARLY CLASSICS

1. Theologico-Political Treatise - Benedict de Spinoza
2. Thoughts on Religion - Denis Diderot
3. The System of Nature - Paul-Henry Thiry, Baron d'Holbach
4. The Natural History of Religion - David Hume
5. The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine
6. A Refutation of Deism - Percy Bysshe Shelley
7. Immortality - John Stuart Mill
8. Evangelical Teaching - George Eliot
9. The Spirit of Rationalism in Europe - W.E.H. Lecky
10. The Christian Church and Women - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
11. Humanity's Gain from Unbelief - Charles Bradlaugh
12. Miracle - Anatole France
13. Autobiography - Charles Darwin
14. The Antichrist - Friedrich Nietzsche
15. God and the Constitution - Robert G. Ingersoll
16. The Essence of Religion in General - Ludwig Feuerbach
17. God and the State - Michael Bakunin
18. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right - Karl Marx


FROM THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY CLASSICS

19. The Philosophy of Atheism - Emma Goldman
20. On the Scopes Trial - H.L. Mencken
21. The Lord's Day Alliance - Clarence Darrow
22. Why I Am an Unbeliever - Clarence Darrow
23. Is There a God? - Bertrand Russell
24. The Claims of Theology - A.J. Ayer
25. The UNbelievers and the Christians - Albert Camus
26. Science and Religion - Albert Einstein


FROM THE LATER 20th CENTURY and 21st CENTURY

27. Monotheism and Its Discontents - Gore Vidal
28. How Is Atheism to Be Characterized? - Kai Nielsen
29. Atheism - Christine Overall
30. The Atheist Manifesto - Sam Harris
31. Why There Almost Certainly Is No God - Richard Dawkins
32. Religion as an Original Sin - Christopher Hitchens
33. In the Service of the Death Fixation - Michel Onfray
34. Thank Goodness! - Daniel C. Dennett
35. For the Love of Reason - Louise M. Anthony
36. If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted? - Elizabeth Second Anderson
37. An Atheist Childhood - Tariq Ali
A Rapper's Song - Greydon Square
38. Humanism and the Territory of Novelists - Salman Rushdie
39. Why My Dog Is Not a Humanist - Kurt Vonnegut


EPILOGUE: A New Enlightenment: The Second Wave - Dimitrios Roussopoulos

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

RESOURCE GUIDE from the Website of Richard Dawkins

CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS

Celebrity quotes throughout, including from George Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aldous HUxley, Tennessee Williams, Charles Bukowski, Jean-Paul Sartre, Noam Chomsky, Sigmund Freud, Ingmar Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, John Malkovich, Robert Altman, Jodie Foster, Bill Gates, Angelina Jolie, Jack Nicholson, Howard Stern, Isaac Asimov, Woody Allen, Richard Leakey, James Watson, Jean Roddenberry, Gloria Steinem.


DIMITRIOS ROUSSOPOULOS is author and/or editor of some eighteen books.
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Fields, Factories and Workshops
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1995
Library of Congress HC53.K7 1994

Introduction by George Woodcock

It would not be an exaggeration to describe this book as the central work of Kropotkin’s writing career. In one way or another, it occupied more than twenty years of his life. It is a work of argument and suggestion rather than dogmatic statement, and the very tentativeness of this great book make its perceptions all the more relevant.

With at one time Kropotkin’s view of our future might have been regarded as a Utopian dream, today, as a result of the growing realization that the world’s resources of energy and raw materials are finite, that food is our most precious commodity and that people’s working lives are futile and stultifying, the lessons of this book, for both the rich world and the poor, are topical and hopeful.

In addition to a general introduction to the most significant aspects of Kropotkin’s life and thought, George Woodcock has prepared a comprehensive afterword to each essay, allowing the reader to fully see Kropotkin’s ideas in the context of the world a century later.

Is the 9th volume of the The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin.

Table of contents

Editor’s Introduction

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

Chapter 1

The Decentralization of Industries

Editor’s Afterword to Chapter 1

Chapter 2

The Possibilities of Agriculture

Editor’s Afterword to Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Small Industries and Industrial Villages

Editor’s Afterword to Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Brain Work and Manual Work

Editor’s Afterword to Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Conclusion

Editor’s Epilogue


1994: 255 pages, index
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Filtering The News
Jeffery Klaehn
Black Rose Books, 2005

The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation
Edited by Nalini Mohabir and Ronald Cummings
Black Rose Books, 2021 Dewey Decimal 371.82996071427

In 1969, in one of the most significant black student protests in North American history, Caribbean students called out discriminatory pedagogical practices at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), before occupying the computer center for two weeks. Upon the breakdown of negotiations, the police launched a violent crackdown as a fire mysteriously broke out inside the center and racist chants were hurled by spectators on the street. It was a heavily mediatized flashpoint in the Canadian civil rights movement and the international Black Power struggle that would send shockwaves as far as the Caribbean. Half a century later, we continue to grapple with the legacies of this watershed moment in light of current resistance movements such as Black Lives Matter, calls for reparations, or Rhodes Must Fall. How is the Sir George Williams “affair” remembered, forgotten, or contested? How is blackness included or occluded in decolonizing dialogues?
 
The Fire That Time addresses those questions while it commemorates and reflects upon the transnational resonances of Black protest and radical student movements. Through several thoughtful essays, scholars examine the unfinished business of decolonization and its relationship to questions of pedagogy, institutional life and culture, and ongoing discussions about race and racism.
 
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The Forgotten Revolution: The 1919 Hungarian Republic of Councils
Edited by András B. Göllner
Black Rose Books, 2020

After the ravages of World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Budapest was engulfed by revolution and marauding foreign armies in 1919. Factory workers, disillusioned ex-soldiers, landless peasants, artists, and intellectuals began forming grassroots councils to get the country back on its feet. This groundswell produced a unique cross-class alliance in pursuit of social justice, constitutionalism, and sustainable economic development, which quickly led to the formation of the Hungarian Republic of Councils. After only four months, however, this radically new experiment in self-government ended in tragedy and virtually all of the Republic’s leadership were executed. Over time, the revolution has not only been smeared by the Hungarian right wing but also misunderstood and largely forgotten by the rest of the world.

This volume will set the historical record straight on the heroic but tragic events of 1919, paying tribute to the people who gave their lives to a tenacious and courageous idea. These essays bring together internationally respected scholars from Europe and North America, including Péter Csunderlik, Raquel Varela, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Magda Aranyossi, Lajos Csoma, Susan Zimmermann, Christopher Adam, András B. Göllner, Marie-Josée Lavallée, and Dimitrios Roussopoulos.
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Free Public Transit: And Why We Don't Pay to Ride Elevators
Edited by Jason Prince and Judith Delheim
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress HE305.F74 2018 | Dewey Decimal 388.4

Just like we don't pay to use elevators, this book argues that we shouldn't pay to ride public transit. In an age of increasing inequalities and ecological crisis, movements advocating free public transit push us to rethink the status quo and consider urban transit as a fundamental human right. Editors Jason Prince and Judith Dellheim have collected a panorama of case studies from around the world: the United States, Canada, Estonia, Greece, France, Italy, Sweden, Poland, China, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and more. These movements are spread across the world, and they aim to achieve two main outcomes—ecological good and fair wealth distribution. Free public transit—coupled with increased capacity and improving service of public transit—might well be the only viable strategy to eliminating car usage and achieving greenhouse gas targets in industrialized cities within a reasonable timeframe. Movements for free mass transit also aim to see public transit treated as a public good, like water and garbage service, that should be paid for out of general tax revenues or a fairer regional tax strategy. This book covers the rapidly changing transport options in cities today, including bike and car share options, Uber and Lyft, and the imminent arrival of driver-less vehicles. The first English-language book ever written on the subject, Free Public Transit is a ground breaking book for those concerned about the future of our cities and an essential resource for those who make, or try to change, urban planning and transport policies.
 
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French Revolution
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1989

With the international celebrations of the French Revolution as background, the publication of Peter Kropotkin's classic with an introduction by George Woodcock represents the fulfilment of an important documentary need.  The turbulent upheaval that swept in the first mighty revolution in the West, and which had such far ranging consequences, has subsequently been described by a thousand differing pens. From the King's summoning of the Estates General in 1789 to the establishment of the Directory in 1793, the revolution has had many interpretations. But Kropotkin is among the very few who analyses this drama not only as a complex interplay of its leading personalities or a chain of political decisions made from above; rather, he penetrates this surface confusion to describe a great reordering of the economic bases of the ancien régime by the mass of urban workers and the peasantry. He saw the redistribution of land impeded at every step by an aggrandising middle class and by the forces of the counter-revolution inside and outside France.  Kropotkin, as a true historian, was not concerned with merely the period he discussed. He saw it as a climax in a long past and future development. The result is a very skillful and absorbing book, with great momentum, an active and readable style, and a capable use of a mass of details regarding the most obscure but no less important aspects of the French Revolution.  First published in 1909 and long out of print, The Great French Revolution is the finest historical writing from the fluent pen of Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). The introduction by George Woodcock, the celebrated Canadian author, throws a modern light on the significance and scope of Kropotkin's contribution.
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Friendly Fascism
Bertram Gross
Black Rose Books, 1990

The 8th November 2016 marked a startling new era in American political life. After the creeping ascent of Right wing authoritarian parties in the UK and Europe Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election brought an alarming form of “alt-right” neo-conservativism into the American political mainstream. Many aspects of this descent into the darkness of fascism was predicted by Bertram Gross in Friendly Fascism, a provocative and original critique of a subtle yet growing fascism in American political life. Gross shows that the chronic problems faced by the U.S. in the late twentieth century required increasing collusion between big business and big government to manage society in the interests of the privileged and powerful. The resulting “friendly fascism”, Gross suggests, lacks the dictatorships, public spectacles and overt brutality of 20th century fascism, but has at its root the same denial of individual freedoms and democratic rights. No one who cares about the future of democracy can afford to ignore the frightening realities of Friendly Fascism.
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From the Ground Up: Essays on Grassroots Democracy
Edited by C. George Benello
Black Rose Books, 2019

Should today's activists aim for more than reformist changes in the policies and personnel of giant corporations and the government? In this collection of classic essays, C. George Benello persuasively argues that modern so­cial movements need to rise to the challenge of spearheading a radical re­organization of society based on the principles of decentralization, community control, and participatory democracy.
 
Integrating some of the best of New Left thought and practice with more recent populist and Green perspectives, Benello's essays and the commentaries of Harry Boyte, Steve Chase, Walda Katz-Fishman, Jane Mansbridge, Chuck Turner, and other major activists from the 1960’s offer important insights for today's new generation of practical utopians. Originally published in 1993, this revised and updated edition also includes “The New Movement and its Theory of Organization,” a discussion by David Wieck, Todd Gitlin, George Woodcock, J. F. Conway, and Joan Renold.
 
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Fugitive Writings
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1993
Library of Congress HX833.K745 1993 | Dewey Decimal 320.57

Introduction by George Woodcock

These essays, which either have not been previously published or have been out of print, embrace Kropotkin's philosophy at a time when he first gave it expression.

This collection contains selected essays by Peter Kropotkin who was, unquestionably, the most widely read and respected theorist of anarchism. It is intended to make some of his most representative writings more accessible. The material consists of essays which either have not been previously published or have been out of print since their original publication.

While the entire scope of Kropotkin's political thinking cannot possibly be projected in a single volume, it is hoped that many of his most fundamental conceptions have been exemplified here, for these essays embrace Kropotkin's philosophy at a time when he was struggling to first give them expression.

In this context, Kropotkin's very first political essay, Must We Occupy Ourselves With An Examination of the Ideal of a Future System, written in 1873, which foreshadows most of his later writings, is of particular value.

Apart from a general introduction to the most significant aspects of Kropotkin's life and thought, George Woodcock has prepared a preface to each essay allowing the reader to enter into the spirit of the time.


Table of Contents

Preface

Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the Ideal Future System?

Preface

Anarchist Communism: Its Basics and Principles

Preface

Anarchist Morality

Preface

The State: Its Historic Role


1993: 240 pages
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Germany East: Dissent and Opposition
Bruce Allen
Black Rose Books, 1991
Library of Congress DD283.A45 1991

Green Politics, Green Economics
Athena Palaeologu
Black Rose Books, 2017

Given the world-wide ecological crisis, to what extent do the current economic systems of production and consumption need to change? To make substantial changes to the dominant economic system as the author proposes, area new politics required? What are the relations between economic and political changes? M. Athena Palaeologu’s lucid and engaging analysis offers concrete proposals for moving beyond our current social and environmental impasse.  In market-driven economies around the world ecological crises are creating major problems of supply and distribution. The inability of governments to manage these environmental problems both domestically and internationally has led to widespread contradictions between public rhetoric and political practice. A growing number of contemporary publications respond to these crises by advocating a successful marriage of the corporate marketplace with the goals of environmentalism, in a marketing landscape where large and small corporations are tripping over each other to present their “green”credentials. M. Athena Palaeologu’s timely work Green Politics,Green Economics examines these apologetic responses to broach an uncomfortable but fundamental question–is long-term and sustainable development really possible under market capitalism?  Palaeologu develops two alternative approaches to these environmental challenges: (i) a“green politics”that places major importance on achieving ecological goals through grassroots participatory citizen involvement, drawing heavily on values shared with feminist and social movements, and; (ii) a“green economics”that address the dynamic and spatial interdependence between human economies and the natural ecosystems which sustain them. The focus of both of these approaches is the“scale”conundrum: how are we to implement a green economics capable of realising development within the ecological constraints of our planet’s biosphere?
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House of Mirrors: Justin Trudeau's Foreign Policy
Yves Engler
Black Rose Books, 2021
Library of Congress F1034.2.E545 2020

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau presents himself as progressive on foreign affairs. According to Trudeau, he and his Liberals have brought Canada back after the disastrous Conservative government under Stephen Harper. In House of Mirrors, Yves Engler asks probing questions and demonstrates that the opposite is true: Trudeau, he argues, largely continued Harper’s foreign policy.
 
House of Mirrors outlines how Trudeau’s government has expanded the military while ignoring international efforts to restrict nuclear weapons proliferation. The Liberals, Engler shows, have launched an unprecedented effort to overthrow Venezuela’s government while siding with an assortment of reactionary governments. Flouting their climate commitments, the Trudeau government also failed to follow through on its promise to rein in Canada’s controversial mining sector.
 
With heavily documented analysis, House of Mirrors gives insight into the Liberals’ rhetorical skills that whitewash their pro-corporate and conservative policies with progressive slogans.
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How The First World War Began
Edward e. Mccullough
Black Rose Books, 1998

Imagining the Middle East
Thierry Hentsch
Black Rose Books, 1992
Library of Congress D34.M628H4613 1992

Examines how Western perceptions of the Middle East were formed and how we have used them as a rationalization for setting policies and determining actions. 
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Insatiable Hunger: Colonial Encounters in Context
Joseph Graham
Black Rose Books, 2021 Dewey Decimal 970.00497

An exploration of the worldviews that underpinned settler colonialism. 

The sixteenth-century European wars of religion set the stage for mass migration to the New World. Of course, there was nothing new about the New World to Indigenous peoples who had lived there for millennia. Insatiable Hunger compares European historical accounts and Indigenous stories of contact to illustrate the wide cultural chasm that separated the two civilizations. Joseph Graham tells a story of religiously obsessed Europeans pouring onto the continent and consuming everything in their path and the attempts Indigenous peoples made to reason with the hungry newcomers. Tracing events from Jacques Cartier’s first visits in the sixteenth century to the War of 1812, Insatiable Hunger attempts to understand the root causes of the mutual incomprehension baked into these two civilizations’ worldviews. As descendants of European settlers in Canada and the United States confront the legacy of colonialism and genocide of Indigenous peoples, Insatiable Hunger will be an important primer on the worldviews at the root of this violent political project.
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Karl Polanyi In Dialogue
Michael Brie
Black Rose Books, 2017

The contemporary Left fights its political battles on various fronts: protesting the crippling structural inequalities that sustain neoliberal economic policy; developing sustainable, community-based alternatives to the consumerism and short-termism that exacerbate the environmental crisis; and advocating for the cultural recognition, emancipation and celebration of the diversity and pluralism of human identity. But despite this versatility the Left appears to be in worldwide retreat whilst an aggressive new ‘Alt-Right’ is taking to the internet and the streets, regurgitating a regressive and patriarchal vision of society that has already won startling political victories in the US and Europe.

Amidst the vertiginous tension of such a crisis, Michael Brie argues for an urgent theoretical and practical reorganisation of the Left. Developing the work of philosopher and social theorist Karl Polanyi, Brie advocates an alliance of socialist liberals and libertarian ‘commonists’ that unites contemporary campaigns for recognition, difference and human dignity with more traditional struggles for social welfare and economic democracy. Starting with Nancy Fraser’s critical reappraisal of Polanyi in her article “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi” (included), Brie powerfully reinterprets Polanyi’s thought for present times, developing concrete proposals for a Polanyian political response to neoliberalism, an ascendent authoritarian right and the ongoing threat of global ecological disaster. Also included are two articles by Polanyi translated into English for the first time and Kari Polanyi-Levitt’s lecture at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation “From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialisation”.

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Karl Polanyi's Vision of a Socialist Transformation
Edited by Michael Brie and Claus Thomasberger
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress HB102.P64K37 2018 | Dewey Decimal 335

The political and economic turmoil that followed our most recent financial crisis has sparked a huge resurgence of interest in the work of Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), famous anthropologist, economist, and social philosopher. Polanyi’s 1944 masterpiece, The Great Transformation, spoke of dangerous increasing dominance of the market and the resulting counter-movements, a prediction that has been borne out by current international grassroots resistance to austerity, alienation, and environmental upheaval of our world.
 
In Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist Transformation, German social and economic philosophers Michael Brie and Claus Thomasberger bring together central figures in in the field—including Gareth Dale, Nancy Fraser, and Kari Polanyi Levitt—to provide an essential anthology on the contemporary importance of Polanyi’s thought. This book is centered around Polanyi's ideas on freedom and community in a complex socialist society based on a completely transformed economy. It also includes five 1920s essays by Polanyi recently discovered in the Montreal Polanyi archive and translated into English for the first time, including his lecture “On Freedom”, which is central to his unique understanding of socialism.  
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Kropotkin Now!: Life, Freedom & Ethics
Edited by Christopher Coquard
Black Rose Books, 2021

Essays on the revolutionary Russian anarchist’s ideas about mutual aid, sex, and participatory democracy for the twenty-first century. 

Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was one of the great thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a  Russian anarchist, philosopher, economist, historian, geographer, and scientist, Kropotkin had a range of contributions that were as divergent as they were holistic. Kropotkin’s critical thought on issues such as mutual aid and anarchism have become tenets of multiple twenty-first-century social movements. As the foundations of neoliberalism shake and neofascist movements spawn around the world, the practice of mutual aid, the theories of anarchism and participatory democracy, and critique of social Darwinism have seldom been as important as they are today.  Many activists and scholars are using Kropotkin’s ideas to challenge these authoritarian threats and to work toward an egalitarian future. Kropotkin Now! is the culmination of an international effort to investigate Kropotkin’s ideas and to imagine new alternatives on the centenary of his death. Contributors engage Kropotkin’s work in diverse contexts, including evolution and mutual aid, cyborgs and feminist technoscience, Kropotkin’s treatment of “the sex question,” urbanization, building dual power, and more.
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Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada
Yves Engler
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress JL197.N4E54 2019

The left is supposed to be opposed to colonialism and at least skeptical of nationalism. However, Left, Right shows that, for decades now, this hasn’t been the case in Canada. Yves Engler marshals damning detail on the long, surprising history of support from the New Democratic Party and labor unions for such policies and international interventions as the coup in Haiti, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Korean War, and much more. The rhetoric of the mainstream left, he shows, has also tended to concede major points to the dominant war-mongering ideology, with prominent commentators such as Linda McQuaig and Stephen Lewis echoing the terminology of right-wing politicians and thinkers. More than simply diagnosing a problem, however, Left, Right offers a path forward, laying out ways to get us working for an ecologically sound, peace-promoting, and non-exploitative foreign policy.
 
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Limits Of The City
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1985

"City air makes people free." With this adage Murray Bookchin begins a remarkable essay on the evolution of urbanism. With a wealth of learning and a depth of passion, Bookchin convincingly argues that there was once a human and progressive tradition of urban life, and that this heritage has reached its "ultimate negation in the modern metropolis". 
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Louise Michel
Edith Thomas
Black Rose Books, 1984

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media: The Companion Book to the Award-Winning Film
Mark Achbar
Black Rose Books, 1994
Library of Congress P85.C47M36 1994 | Dewey Decimal 302.23

Memoirs Of A Revolutionist
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1987

Introduction by George Woodcock

This precious work, which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, was published in book form in 1899. Having delighted readers as varied as Leo Tolstoy and Lewis Mumford, Memoirs continues to be a classic in this literary genre.

Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was born into the highest rank of the Russian aristocracy. This fascinating account of his dramatic conversion from prince to anarchist is more than an autobiography; it is an extraordinary portrait of the old Russia, both before and after the liberation of the serfs.

Kropotkin was a remarkable writer in the Russian tradition, and this work stands as a non-fictional counterpart of the novels in which Turgenev and other great Russian writers portray the development of social conscience among the youth in autocratic society.

Having renounced his title, Kropotkin pursued his work as a scientist and won international acclaim as a geographer as well as a radical. Memoirs is also a study of the early anarchist movement in Western Europe, in which Kropotkin played a part after his escape from a Russian prison – thereby earning a second imprisonment, this time in France.

George Woodcock, one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters has written biographies of such monumental figures as Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.


Table of Contents

AN INTRODUCTION by George Woodcock

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I. CHILDHOOD

II. THE CORPS OF PAGES

III. SIBERIA

IV. ST. PETERSBURG – FIRST JOURNEY TO WESTERN EUROPE

V. THE FORTRESS – THE ESCAPE

VI. WESTERN EUROPE


1989: 504 pages
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Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy
Rose A. Dyson
Black Rose Books, 2020
Library of Congress P96.V5D98 2021

Although rogue elements on the internet have spawned concerns about foreign interference in elections, invasion of privacy, and the impact of hate speech, most people are still in denial about the harmful effects of media violence as entertainment. This new edition of Mind Abuse covers developments in the last twenty years, showing how the problem has grown with each new technological innovation and how relentless marketing victimizes countless young people around the world while the entertainment industry rakes in billions. Rose A. Dyson offers a wake-up call to parents, teachers, health professionals, and policy makers who deal with the aftermath of first-person shooter video gaming and social media abuses, such as cyberbullying, that encourage errant behavior from an early age. She shows that recent trends toward increased violence in popular culture are symptomatic of deeper social, economic, and ecological problems that require an urgent shift away from the status quo toward a more sustainable model for peaceful co-existence. 
 
For over 30 years, Dyson has contributed to the debate over media violence. Here, she urges us to resist the corporate giants of the entertainment industries and reclaim the right to shape our own value systems and dreams. Blind consumption of media violence as entertainment, she argues, is not inconsistent with vital policies for a greener, healthier future.
 
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Murray Bookchin Reader
Janet Biehl
Black Rose Books, 1999

This collection provides an overview of the thought of the foremost social theorist and political philosopher of the libertarian left today. Best known for introducing ecology as a concept relevant to radical political thought in the early 1960s, Murray Bookchin was the first to propose, in the innovative and coherent body of ideas that he has called "social ecology", that a liberatory society would also have to be an ecological one. His writings span five decades and encompass subject matter of remarkable breadth. Bookchin's writings on revolutionary philosophy, politics and history are far less known than the specific controversies that have surrounded him, but deserve far greater attention. Despite Bookchin's critical engagement with both Marxism and anarchism, his political philosophy, known as libertarian municipalism, draws on the best of both for the emancipatory tools to build a democratic, libertarian alternative. His nature philosophy is an organic outlook of generation, development, and evolution that grounds human beings in natural evolution yet, contrary to today's fashionable anti-humanism, places them firmly at its summit. Bookchin's anthropological writings trace the rise of hierarchy and domination out of egalitarian societies, while his historical writings cover important chapters in the European revolutionary tradition. Consistent throughout Bookchin's work is a search for ways to replace today's capitalist society--which disenchants most of humanity for the benefit of the few and is poisoning the natural world--with a more rational and humane alternative. The selections in this reader constitute a sampling from the writings of one of the most pivotal thinkers of our era.
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Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1986

In Mutual Aid, which was first published in 1903, the renowned geographer applies his explorations of Eastern Asia and his study of wild-animal behaviour to a critical examination of the theory of evolution. His arguments anticipate in a remarkable way the contention of contemporary ecologists that the world of nature is one of interdependence rather than strife.   Born in 1942 into an ancient military family of Russian princes, Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin was selected as a child for the elite Corps of Pages by Czar Nicholas I himself. Shortly before his death in 1921, Kropotkin had moved so far from his aristocratic beginnings and had attained such stature as a libertarian leader that he could with with impunity to Lenin, “Vladimir Ilyich, your actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.”   Kropotkin provides a potent argument for anarchism by showing that people tend to cooperate spontaneously and that the state destroys this natural inclination towards mutual aid by strangling initiative with the dead hand of regulation.   With the exception of his memoirs, this is Kropotkin's best-known work, and it is widely regarded as his masterpiece. It forms the cornerstone of his philosophy, and constitutes the most successful attempt by any writer to put anarchism on a scientific foundation. Mutual Aid is still the best refutation of the Darwinian thesis of survival of the fittest.
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Nationalism And Culture
Rudolf Rocker
Black Rose Books, 1997

Originally published in 1937, Rudolf Rocker’s classic Nationalism and Culture is a detailed study of the intellectual development and cultural history of European nationalism. Tracing the evolution of religious and political systems and their relation to the authoritarian state, Rocker analyses concepts of ‘Nation’ as alleged communities of race, culture, language,and common interest.
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On the Barricades of Berlin: An Account of the 1848 Revolution
August Brass
Black Rose Books, 2019

The 1848 wave of worker rebellions that swept across Europe struck the German states with the March Revolution.  The writer August Brass led the successful defense of the barricades in Berlin's Alexanderplatz public square. Published in English for the first time, On the Barricades of Berlin provides a riveting firsthand account of this uprising.
 
Brass’ testimony begins with the tumultuous events leading up to the revolution: the peaceful democratic agitation; the demands that were brought to the king; and the key actors involved on all sides of the still peaceful, yet tense, struggle. It then follows the events that led to the outbreak of resistance to the forces of order and sheds light on the aftermath of the fighting once the exhausted Prussian army withdrew from the city.
 
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The Organic Revolutionary: A Memoir from the Movement for Real Food, Planetary Healing, and Human Liberation
Grace Gershuny
Black Rose Books, 2019
Library of Congress S605.5.G48 2019

An influential founding member of the American organic agriculture movement and a long-time organic farmer, Grace Gershuny gives us one of the most comprehensive and deeply personal accounts of adventures in that movement ever written. A principal author of the USDA's first proposed National Organic rule, Gershuny left the National Organic Program staff just before the final rule was published. The complicated story of that movement for nationwide organic regulations, which consumed Gershuny’s life for five years, is interwoven here with her own personal timeline before, during, and after the arduous federal process.
 
This memoir explores how the organic revolution became rooted well before the US federal government cared to notice. Gershuny asks important ongoing questions about the organic movement that still aren’t receiving enough attention, such as whether organic standards should be consumer or farmer-driven and if organic agriculture architecture will be able to maintain its principles as it becomes mainstream. Entertaining yet urgent, Organic Revolutionary thoughtfully details the personal, political, and practical struggles that ensued in the heroic effort to push the organic movement beyond farmers' markets and into supermarkets.
 
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Organicity: Entropy or Evolution
David Dobereiner
Black Rose Books, 2019 Dewey Decimal 338.927

Nature is endlessly reinventing itself in a constant flux of movement and diversity. Yet the advancement of modern civilization has engendered extreme inequality, social division, and an imbalance between society and nature. Our technological proficiency has given our species the illusion of omnipotence; in our efforts to build robots more like us, we have not noticed how robotic we ourselves have become. To deal with this profound crisis, we must understand this problem at its roots. Could the origins of social domination and ecological exploitation be related? Is it possible for us to transform these dynamics and design society in a way that is cognizant of, and harmonious with, the Earth?
 
In this visionary book, David Dobereiner lucidly delves into the present urban and ecological impasse and examines the prospects for our future. Laced with insights into social and political ecology and written with a lifetime’s experience of innovating in ecological design, Organicity shows that there is still hope to build a more humane, egalitarian, and sustainable system, but it requires a fundamental shift in the way we do civilization. At the crossroads of creation and destruction, will evolution or entropy triumph?
 
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Oscar Wilde: The Double Image
George Woodcock
Black Rose Books, 1989
Library of Congress PR5823.W6 1989 | Dewey Decimal 828.809

Oscar Wilde was seemingly drawn towards many paradoxes: paganism and Christianity; to be a playboy or a prophet; or to be an aesthetic clown or the creative critic. George Woodcock takes us through this double image of the celebrated personality and writer and attempts to resolve the contradictions. Wilde was influenced by Walter Pater and the Epicureans, by John Ruskin’s theories on Art and also by his severe criticisms of the Industrial Revolution, and by the writings of Chuang Tzu, the ancient Chinese Taoist. He was also drawn to Jesus trying bravely to fit him into his growing asymmetrical system. The Wilde/Queensborough ‘scandal’ trial is not much discussed here, but the resultant works are: De Profundis, the letter to Lord Douglas, erstwhile lover and nemesis; The Ballad of Reading Gaol, that heartrending dry of pain from the universal prison. The paradox: this is the same man who wrote frothy plays like The Importance of Being Earnest and the manifesto, The Souls of Man Under Socialism, which is included in this book, a work which socialists do not take seriously because they have difficulty envisioning a non-authoritarian society. Oscar Wilde could. In reality, he expressed an anarchist, individualist vision, straight, thus coming close to unraveling his own, and our paradox.
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The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition
Edited by Roger Berkowitz
Black Rose Books, 2021 Dewey Decimal 177.3

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) is the leading thinker of politics and the humanities in the modern era and continues to draw widespread attention. No other scholar so enrages and engages citizens and scholars from all political persuasions, all the while insisting on human dignity, providing a clear voice against totalitarianism, and defending freedom with extraordinary intelligence and courage. An activist and thinker whose work resists simple categorization, Arendt writes with a stunning lucidity that resonates with intellectuals and the reading public alike. Her writing continues to delight and inspire, even as she asks us to confront the most haunting questions of our time.

The Perils of Invention is based on three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences: "Human Being in an Inhuman Age," "Lying and Politics," and "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts." Contributions written for these conferences are placed alongside many new essays that reflect on the ideas they raised. The result is a freshly invigorated investigation into these critical and timely themes. The authors have diverse backgrounds—Arendt scholars, public intellectuals, novelists, journalists, and business people—and include Uday Mehta, Marrianne Constable, Nicholson Baker, George Kateb, Marianne Constable, Linda M.G. Zerilli, Peg Birmingham, Davide Panagia, and many others.
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Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel
George Woodcock
Black Rose Books, 1990

Anarchism - the concept of a society without authority, of a civil order without any form of constitution or government - has fascinated people almost as long as we have possessed the power of speculative thought. In the general history of anarchism, the name of Peter Kropotkin dominates.

Born in 1842 into an ancient military family of Russian princes, Kropotkin was selected as a child for the elite Corps of Pages by Tsar Nicholas I himself. Shortly before his death in 1921, he had moved so far from his aristocratic beginnings and attained such stature as a libertarian leader that he could write with impunity to Lenin, “Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.”

Woodcock and Avakumovic’s biography, From Prince to Rebel, details the life that flowed between these two points in time. It surveys and analyses the most significant aspects of Kropotkin’s life and thought: his formative years in Russia, 1842-1876, and the origins of his anarchist thinking (military service in eastern Siberia, the influence of the works of Proudhon and Bakunin, his role in the Chaikovsky Circle); his years as an émigré in western Europe, 1876-1917, and the ripening of his political though (editor of Le Révolté, his views on Marxist socialism); and his last years in the Soviet Union, 1917-1921, the revolution and civil war, and his meeting and correspondence with Lenin.

Among the recent works of George Woodcock, a well-known Canadian author, are biographies of William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Black Rose Books). Ivan Avakumovic is Professor of History at the University of British Colombia and the author of History of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.


Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Youth

2. The Explorer

3. The Convert

4. The Agitator

5. “The White Jesus”

6. The Traveller

7. The Writer

8. The Exile

9. The Neglected Sage

10. The Prophet

Bibliography

Supplement for 1971 Edition

Supplement to the 1990 Edition

Index


1990: 490 pages, index, illustrated
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Philosophy Of Social Ecology
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1995
Library of Congress GF80.B66 1990b

A useful corrective to simplistic thinking about the human predicament.--Canadian Book Review Annual

"Bookchin expands upon the concept of natural evolution and delivers it from the trap of mechanistic thinking."--Imprint
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Pioneers Of Ecological Humanism
Brian Morris
Black Rose Books, 2017

“Brian Morris blazed a lot of trails. He is a scholar of genuine daring and great humanity, and his work deserves to be read and debated for a very long time to come." —David Graeber, author ofDebt: The First 5,000 Years In our world of ecological catastrophe and social crisis, some roundly condemn modern civilisation as the source of our Promethean predicament. What can follow is a rejection of humanism, science and the City and a turn to either nostalgic primitivism or esoteric spirituality. But do we really need to flee the city for the woods in order to build a free society? In this triple intellectual biography, Brian Morris lucidly discusses three intellectual giants who made an enormous, though often overlooked, contribution to modern ecology: Lewis Mumford, René Dubos, and Murray Bookchin. Morris argues that they have forged a third way beyond both industrialism and anti-modernism: ecological humanism (also known as social ecology), a tradition that embraces both ecological realities and the ethical and cultural wealth of humanism. In examining their thought, Professor Morris paves the way for fresh debate on ecology, charting an optimistic vision for the profound reharmonisation of nature and culture as well as the ecological, egalitarian and democratic transformation of our cities and society. Essential reading for anyone with an interest or active role in ecology or philosophy and their associated disciplines, Pioneers of Ecological Humanism is written in a clear and refreshingly direct style that will appeal to academics, activists, and armchair ecologists alike. Leaving school at the age of fifteen, Brian Morris had a varied career: foundry worker, seaman, and tea-planter in Malawi, before becoming a university teacher. Now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, he is the author of numerous articles and books on ethnobotany, religion and symbolism, hunter-gatherer societies and concepts of the individual. His books include Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision (2006), Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction (2006), Insects and Human Life (2004) and Kropotkin: The Politics of Community (2004). Black Rose Books is also the publisher of his Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom (1993) and the forthcoming Anarchist Miscellany. Pioneers of Ecological Humanism is essential reading for anyone concerned with these issues. Conversant with the history of ideas, Morris places Bookchin especially in a context that has eluded other authors who have treated his work. His writing style is lucid and accessible.Highly recommended. – Janet Biehl, author, partner of Murray Bookchin 275 pages, Bibliography and Index Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55164-607-7 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-55164-609-1 eBook ISBN: 978-1-55164-611-4 Table of Contents Preface Ecological Humanism: An Introduction Part 1: Lewis Mumford and Organic Humanism 1. The Radical Scholar 2. Lewis Mumford: The Formative Years 3. Technics and Civilisation 4. The Culture of Cities 5. Western Culture and its Transformation: The Rise of Mechanistic Philosophy 6. The Insurgence of Romanticism and Utilitarian Philosophy 7. Mumford's Organic Philosohpy 8. The Renewal of Life Part 2 René Duos and Ecological Humanism 9. René Dubos and the Celebration of Life 10. The Living World and Human Nature 11. Sociocultural Evolution and the Human Personality 12. The Ecology of Health and Disease 13. The Theology of the Earth 14. Humanized Landscapes 15. The Wooing of the Earth 16. Science and Holism Part 3 The Social Ecology of Murray Bookchin 17. Bookchin's Life and Work 18. The Environmental Crisis and Eco-Anarchism 19. Toward an Ecological Society 20. The Concept of Ecological Society 21. The Deep Ecology Movement 22. Deep Ecology, Biocentrism and Misanthropy 23. Neo-Malthusianism and the Politics of Deep Ecology 24. The Philosophy of Social Ecology 25. In Defence of the Enlightenment Bibliography Index
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Political Ecology: System Change Not Climate Change
Dimitri Roussopoulos
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress JA75.8.R685 2019 | Dewey Decimal 363.705613

“System change not climate change!” This cry reverberated throughout the streets of Paris during 2015’s heated COP21 climate negotiations. It was as much a demand as it was an indictment of the failure of existing political institutions to respond adequately to our world’s ecological crisis. In an era of slow motion apocalypse, with 3,500 international environmental agreements to date, where did everything go wrong?
 
In this new and greatly expanded edition of his 1991 classic Political Ecology, Dimitri Roussopoulos delves into the history of environmentalism to explain the failure of the state management of the ecological crisis. He explores civil society’s various past responses and the prospects for channeling environmentalist aspirations into political alternatives, emphasizing the ideas of social ecology and the central role of democratic neighborhoods and cities in developing alternatives. Ecologists, Roussopoulos argues, aim further than simply protecting the environment—they call for new communities, new lifestyles, and a new way of doing politics.
 
This US edition also includes a new preface analyzing the implications of Trump’s presidency for climate politics and an extensive new conclusion analyzing the Paris Accord. Revised, expanded, and updated, Political Ecology is a classic that provides an essential, timely history of the environmental movement now when we need it most. 
 
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The Politics Of Individualism: Liberalism, Liberal Feminism and Anarchism
L Susan Brown
Black Rose Books, 2002

In The Politics of Individualism L. Susan Brown argues for a new vision of human freedom which incorporates the insights of feminism and liberalism into a form of anarchism based on what she calls 'existential individualism.' The work focuses specifically on the similarities and differences of these political philosophies, by critically examining the liberal feminist writings of John Stuart Mill, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir and Janet Radcliffe Richards, paying special attention to the issues of employment, education, marriage and the family, and governmental politics. These works are, in turn, compared and contrasted to the anarcho-feminism of Emma Goldman. Finally, as feminism as a whole movement is subjected to a rigorous critique, in terms of its overall liberatory potential, what emerges is a compelling look at feminist anarchism, describing 'what ought to be--and what could be.'
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Politics Of Social Ecology
Janet Biehl
Black Rose Books, 1997
Library of Congress HD30.27.O54 1998

The culmination of a lifetime of thinking about how society might best be transformed.
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Prometheus Against the Leviathan: Theories About the State
Costas Despiniadis
Black Rose Books, 2023

An examination of the emergence of the modern state and anarchist critiques of it.
 
The emergence of the modern nation-state created institutions of political and economic power unrivaled in human history. This volume argues that, nonetheless, the existence of the state is not an inevitable “end of history,” provided an informed citizenry remembers that all institutions are fleeting and can change in the face of popular resistance. After all, Costas Despiniadis argues, the state is the exception in human history, a deviation from millennia of stateless societies. Perhaps the most thorough contemporary review of theories of the state and its formation, this book considers the work of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, and Marx before turning to examine anarchist readings of the state by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Striner, Landauer, and Nietzsche, finding that anarchist criticisms of the state are borne out by history and that their theories more closely resemble the anthropological records of communities that were clearly more egalitarian and less violent.
 
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Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion
Sol Littman
Black Rose Books, 2003
Library of Congress D757.85.L58 2003 | Dewey Decimal 940.541343

Pure Soldiers traces the 14th Waffen-SS Division's fortunes from its formation in April 1943 until its surrender to the British in May 1946, their subsequent stay as prisoners-of-war in Italy, and their eventual transfer as agricultural workers in Britain.  In 1950 they began their immigration to Canada and the United States. Along the way they were recruited by the British as anti-Soviet spies and by the CIA as political assassins. In spelling out the Division's history, the author attempts to shed light on this acrimonious dispute that rages to the present day.
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Rebel Musics
Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble
Black Rose Books, 2003

A fascinating journey into a rich, complex world, where music and politics unite, where rebel musicians are mobilizing for political change and social justice.
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Rebel Musics, Volume 2: Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Politics of Music Making
Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble
Black Rose Books, 2019

When it was first published in 2003, Rebel Musics sought to explore how musical activism resonates as resistance to the dominant culture, and how political action through music increases the potential for people to determine their own fate. If anything, these issues seem to be even more pressing today. Rebel Musics offers a fascinating journey into a rich, complex world where music and politics unite, and where rebel musicians are mobilizing for political change, resistance, and social justice. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble cover a wide range of artists, genres, and topics, including Thomas Mapfumo, Bob Marley, William Parker, Frank Zappa, Edgard Varese, Ice-T, American blues, West African drumming, hip hop, gospel, rock’n’roll cabaret, Paul Robeson, and free jazz. This book shows how rebel music is at the heart of some of the most incisive critiques of global politics. With explosive lyrics and driving rhythms, rebel musicians are helping to mobilize movements for political change and social justice, at home and around the world.
 
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Black Rose Books, this revised and expanded edition of Rebel Musics will include all the original essays, as well as a new contribution by the editors. Rounding out the new edition will be several new pieces from artists and scholars that will continue to spark debate about these vital topics in compelling ways.
 
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Reclaiming Cities: Revolutionary Dimensions of Political Participation
Yavor Tarinski
Black Rose Books, 2023

How cities can better address the concerns of their citizens through federations.
 
Reclaiming Cities is a global history of the city and the citizen that documents experiences with direct democratic governance and explores the theoretical groundwork that underpins such movements. The mutual interests of the state and multinational corporations routinely thwart any meaningful actions on a wide variety of issues of concern to citizens, such as climate change, labor policy, civil rights, and gun control—issues better addressed by citizens concerned for the well-being of their communities. Yavor Tarinski argues that instead of relying on bureaucratic summits and centralized solutions, cities ought to band together in federations, beyond national boundaries, uniting citizens in struggles against ecological catastrophe and other existential crises.
 
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Remaking Society
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1992

The Rise Of Cities
Dimitri Roussopoulos
Black Rose Books, 2017

Featuring essays from Dimitri Roussopoulos, Shawn Katz, Bill Freeman, Patrick J. Smith and Ann Marie Utratel In the early 2000s human society entered a new urban epoch in which the majority of human beings live in cities. The Rise of Cities: Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver and Other Cities offers an intriguing response to this milestone. Taking the 150th anniversary of Canada in 2017 as an opportunity to respond to essential urban questions through the lens of Canada’s three major cities, the contributors present a stimulating analysis of how cities coalesce, develop, and thrive, and how they can be remade to better serve the lifeblood of all cities – their citizens. Also featuring essays on urban activism in Barcelona and Madrid, The Rise of Cities provides a rigorous and accessible introduction to the key questions of 21st century urbanism. 214 Pages; Includes Bibliography Paperback ISBN; 978-1-55164-334-2 Hardback ISBN: 978-1-55164-335-9 eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-55164-615-2 Table of Contents From the Rise of Cities to the Right to the City - By Way of an Introduction -Dimitri Roussopoulos Montréal -Shawn Katz and Dimitri Roussopoulos Toronto -Bill Freeman Vancouver -Patrick J. Smith Other Cities: Social Movements and Barcelona, Madrid -Ann Marie Utratel Biographical Notes on Contributors Bibliography
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Russian And French Prison
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1991
Library of Congress HV9712.K7 1991 | Dewey Decimal 365.947

With an introduction by George Woodcock.

Nearly a century has passed since Kropotkin wrote In Russian and French Prisons, yet his criticisms of the penal system have lost none of their relevance. Prisons- far from reforming the offender, or deterring crime- are, in themselves, “schools of crime”. Every year, thousands of prisoners are returned to society without hope, without a trade, or without nay means of subsistence, and statistics show that once a man has been in prison he is likely to return. Moreover, the new offense is likely to be more serious than the first.

Although Kropotkin makes extensive use of the memoirs of former prisoners and the works of contemporary penologists, it is his own experience in prison--he spent five years behind bars, two in Russia, three in France--that gives this book its power. He shows from first hand knowledge the immense human suffering caused by prison life: how it destroys the mind and body, how it degrades and humiliates, how it perverts the prisoner’s character and robs him of his dignity, how it reduces him to the condition of a caged animal, how his whole life is subjected to a deadly mechanical routine, how everything is done to break his spirit and kill his inner strength.

In Russian and French Prisons is the 6th volume of The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin.


Table of Contents

Introduction to the 1991 edition by George Woodcock

Author’s preface to the Russian edition (1906)

Introduction

I. My first acquaintance with Russian prisons

II. Russian prisons

III. The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul

IV. Outcast Russia

V. The exile in Siberia

VI. The exile of Sakhalin

VII. A foreigner in Russian prisons

VIII. In French prisons

IX. On the moral influence of prisons on prisoners

X. Are prisons necessary?

Appendix A- Trial of the Soldiers accused of having carried Letters from Alexis Ravelin

Appendix B- On the part played by the Exiles in the Colonization of Siberia

Appendix C- Extract from a Report on “Administrative Exile,” read by M. Shakeeff at the Sitting of the St. Petersburg Nobility on February 17, 1881

Appendix D- On Reformatories for Boys in France


1991: 387 pages, index
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Russian Literature
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1990
Library of Congress PG3012.K72 1991 | Dewey Decimal 891.709003

Introduction by George Woodcock

In this work, Peter Kropotkin is propounding the thesis that, in Russia, literature occupies a inique position because it is the only way of reflecting the real currents of intellectual development and of underground political opinion. The consequence, he feels, has been that the best minds of the country have chosen the poem, the novel, the satire, or literary criticism as the medium for expressing their aspirations, their conceptions of national life, and their ideals.

Concentrating on content rather than on form, on intention rather than achievement, Russian Literature provides a fair and comprehensive introduction to Russian writing up to the end of the nineteenth century. Almost every poet and prose-writer of any significance is discussed – Pushkin, Lermontoff, Gogol, Turgueneff, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky – and every class of literature is included; criticism as well as novels, and political writings as well as poetry.



Table of Contents

Preface

The Pronunciation of Russian Names

An Introduction by George Woodcock

Chapter I: Introduction

Chapter II: Pushkin and Lermontoff

Chapter III: Gogol

Chapter IV: Turgueneff - Tolotsy

Chapter V: Gontcharoff – Dostoyevskiy – Nekrasoff

Chapter VI: The Drama

Chapter VII: The Folk Novelists

Chapter VIII: Political Literature – Satire – Art Criticism – Later Period Novelists

Bibliographical Notes

Appendices



Index

1991: 385 pages, index
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Self-Determination Struggles: In Pursuit of the Democratic Confederalist Ideal
Thomas Jeffrey Miley
Black Rose Books, 2023

A thorough contemporary discussion of the meaning and theory of self-determination.
 
Self-determination is a concept as indispensable as it is contentious. This volume examines the theory and meaning of self-determination today through an exploration of the work of figures such as Rosa Luxembourg, Frantz Fanon, and Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Leaving no stone unturned, Self-Determination Struggles not only includes radical political movements and thinkers but makes them the core of its investigations, presenting them in granular, revealing detail rare to find elsewhere.
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Social Ecology and the Right to the City: Towards Ecological and Democratic Cities
Edited by Federico Venturini, Emet Degirmenci, and Inés Morales
Black Rose Books, 2019 Dewey Decimal 307.76

Cities today are increasingly at the forefront of the environmental and social crisis—they are simultaneously a major cause and a potential solution. Across the world, a new wave of urban social movements is rising to fight against corporate control, social exclusion, hostile immigration policies, gender oppression, and ecological devastation. These movements are building economic, social, and political alternatives based on solidarity, equality, and participation. This anthology develops the debates that began at the recent Transnational Institute of Social Ecology’s (TRISE) conference about the dire need to rebuild the social and political realities of our world’s cities. It discusses the prospects of radical urban movements; examines the revolutionary potential of the concept of “the Right to the City,” and looks at how activists, scholars, and community movements can work together towards an ecological and democratic future. A fruitful conversation between theory and practice, this book opens new ground for rethinking systemic urban change in a way that challenges oppression and transforms how people work, create, and live together.
 
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Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People’s History of the Canadian Military
Yves Engler
Black Rose Books, 2021
Library of Congress UA600.E48 2021 | Dewey Decimal 355.033071

We Stand on Guard for Whom? is the first book to present a history of the Canadian military from the perspective of its victims. In his eleventh book, Yves Engler, the prolific author and critic of Canadian politics, exposes the reality of Canadian wars, repression, and military culture despite the mythologies of Canada as an agent for international peacekeeping and humanitarianism.
 
Originating as a British force that brutally dispossessed First Nations, the Canadian Forces regularly quelled labor unrest in the decades after Confederation. It would go on to participate in military occupations or invasions in Sudan, South Africa, Europe, Korea, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Libya, as well as Canadian gunboat diplomacy and UN deployments that have ousted elected governments. As the federal government department with by far the greatest budget, staff, PR machine, and intelligence-gathering capacities, this book shows how the Canadian military is a key developer of military technology, including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. It also has an immense ecological footprint and a toxic patriarchal, racist, and anti-democratic culture.
 
However, as this book shows, Canadian militarism has always been contested, as early as opposition to conscription during World War I and as especially during peace activism against the US war in Indochina. More recently, city councils have declared themselves nuclear weapons free zones and prevented hosting of weapons bazaars and, in 2003, antiwar activists stopped Prime Minister Jean Chrétien from leading Canada into the US-led invasion of Iraq. This book reveals the hidden militarism in Canadian life and reminds us that the first step to contest it is to recognize its pervasiveness and power.
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Subcomandante Marcos: Global Rebel Icon
Nicholas Henck
Black Rose Books, 2019 Dewey Decimal 972.750836092

The unexpected insurrection of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994 toppled the notion that the triumph of neoliberalism represented the end of history. In the clamor that followed, a masked, pipe-smoking horseman appeared as the spokesperson for the indigenous rebels.
 
In this book, Nick Henck provides a concise and accessible overview of the life, thought, and achievements of the professor-turned-guerrilla Subcomandante Marcos. Through his academic exodus and immersion in the indigenous communities of the Lacandon jungle, to his participation in a guerilla army, to his eloquent articulation of the struggles of oppressed peoples around the world, Marcos became a revered and inspiring enigma. Henck explores Marcos’s considerable accomplishments in four main fields: his role as spokesperson for the Zapatistas; his contribution to Latin American literature and a new political language for the left; his work in making Mexico a more democratic, inclusive, and just nation; and his role as an inspirational international political icon. Published for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Zapatista uprising, this book is not just a biography but also a reminder that there are alternative ways of doing politics: that another world is possible.
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Subverting Politics: Autonomous Social Movements Today
Edited by Marcos Ancelovici and Francis Dupuis-Déri
Black Rose Books, 2023

An investigation of how social movements and activists can undermine structures of political power by redefining participation.
 
The past decade has witnessed the resurgence of autonomy-inspired movements in many countries across Europe, North America, and Latin America. From the Indignados to the Occupy Movement and Antifa, from Indigenous mobilizations at Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter, and from radical feminists to climate justice activists, the influence of the ideals and practices of autonomy seems more alive and pervasive than ever. Subverting Politics explores how autonomous social movements navigate the state despite overwhelming tides of corporate and political dominance. Featuring essays from various scholars and academics such as Jason Del Gandio, AK Thompson, Miguel A. Martínez, Émeline Fourment, Rachel Sarrasin, and others, this investigation into the rise and resurgence of social movements is extremely timely for readers seeking new political inspirations.
 
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Take the City: Voices of Radical Municipalism
Edited by Jason Toney
Black Rose Books, 2020
Library of Congress JS113.T35 2022 | Dewey Decimal 320.8

With rapid increases in urban populations, there is an urgent need to transform our world’s cities in keeping with ecological imperatives and democratic principles. A growing worldwide citizen movement is attempting to challenge bureaucratic administrations and replace the politics of fear with neighborhood power, direct democracy, and solidarity. They believe that threats of capitalism, totalitarianism, and climate change require imaginative political resistance rooted where they live. 
 
Combining political theory, philosophy, history, and intimate narrative, Take the City! presents an expansive view of municipalist movements around the world. With over twenty contributors, including David Harvey, this anthology provides crucial insights into the challenges ahead by looking at and beyond municipal electoral politics. Stories of diverse regions and issues illuminate the nuances of municipalist movements of the past and present, providing a roadmap of the fight for our future. From Seattle to Kurdistan, Burlington to Oaxaca, Barcelona to Mississippi, and Vienna to Montreal, contributors carefully consider the intertwined questions concerning current crises in housing, the environment, democracy, and capitalism. 
 
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Toward an Ecological Society
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1980
Library of Congress HM206.B66 1980 | Dewey Decimal 304.2

Toward an Ecological Society compiles key writings from a seminal period in Murray Bookchin's thought, including essays on urbanism, the relation between ecology and technology, and the ongoing significance of the Nuclear question.  
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Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism
Edited by Thomas Angotti
Black Rose Books, 2019
Library of Congress HT166.T74 2020 | Dewey Decimal 307.1216

Though modern urban planning is only a century old, it appears to be facing extinction. Historically, urban planning has been narrowly conceived, ignoring gaping inequalities of race, class, and gender while promoting unbridled growth and environmental injustices. In Transformative Planning, Tom Angotti argues that unless planning is radically transformed and develops serious alternatives to neoliberal urbanism and disaster capitalism it will be irrelevant in this century. This book emerges from decades of urban planners and activists contesting inequalities of class, race, and gender in cities around the world. It compiles the discussions and debates that appeared in the publications of Planners Network, a North American urban planners’ association. Original contributions have been added to the collection so that it serves as both a reflection of past theory and practice and a challenge for a new generation of activists and planners.
 
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Triumph Of The Market
Edward Herman
Black Rose Books, 1997

The unifying theme of the essays in this volume is the increasing national and global power and reach of the market and its growing impact on all aspects of human life. The phrase "the market" denotes both the corporate institutions that are the leading and dominant factors in production, trade, and finance, and the arrangements, mechanisms, and practices that permit and facilitate the buying and selling of goods and money. Thus, the "triumph of the market" refers to the sharp increase in power, and hegemonic position, of the dominant market participants and to the now almost universal acceptance of market exchanges and private ownership as the exclusive way of organizing economic life.
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The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent
Martin Lukacs
Black Rose Books, 2020
Library of Congress JC574.2 .C2L85 2019

The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent
Martin Lukacs
Black Rose Books, 2020

After a decade of Stephen Harper, the arrival of Justin Trudeau as prime minister of Canada felt like a relief. But as Canadians reckon with the gulf between the dazzling promise of Trudeau’s election and the grim reality of his government, journalist Martin Lukacs makes the case that “real change” was never part of the agenda.
 
Drawing on investigative research and first-hand reporting, Lukacs reveals that behind the latest wave of Trudeaumania was a slick status-quo political machine, backed by a cast of corporate elites and lobbyists who expected a pay-off from Liberal rule in Ottawa. He sheds light on a climate plan hatched in collaboration with Big Oil, the arming of a bloody Saudi war in Yemen, a reconciliation industry masking the ongoing theft of Indigenous lands, and the off-loading of public infrastructure to private profiteers—together these signal not a break from Harper, but a continuation of his destructive legacy. Trudeau’s much-hyped new politics, Lukacs argues, were in fact an Instagram-era spin on an old Liberal approach: playing to people’s desire for far-reaching change in order to ward off a backlash against the Canadian elite.
 
But as the Trudeau formula unravels, Lukacs warns that right-wing scapegoating politicians are misdirecting this growing discontent with the established order. He argues that the only way to defeat the rise of an ugly right—and fulfill the hopes betrayed by Trudeau—is an unapologetically bold response to inequality, racism, and climate breakdown. In this election year and beyond, Lukacs contends that it is time for Canada’s progressive majority to abandon the idea of political saviors and renew the task of collectively winning the world we need.
 
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Unknown Revolution
Voline
Black Rose Books, 1975
Library of Congress DK265.E413 1975 | Dewey Decimal 947.0841

A famous history of the Russian revolution and its aftermath.  This edition reinstates material that has been omitted from recent editions of the English-language version and reproduces the complete text of the original French volumes.
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Villages in Cities: Community Land Ownership and Cooperative Housing in Milton Parc and Beyond
Josh Hawley and Dimitri Roussopoulos
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress HD7287.72.C2V55 2019 | Dewey Decimal 307.3360971

In Montreal in 1968, speculators announced their ‘urban renewal’ plan to demolish six blocks of the downtown heritage neighborhood of Milton Parc in order to build enormous high-rise condos, hotels, office buildings, and shopping malls. The local community viewed this as a declaration of war. What followed was a remarkable struggle that not only saved the heritage architecture from destruction but also protected local residents from gentrification through the creation of the largest nonprofit cooperative housing project on an urban community land trust in North America.
 
And Milton Parc is not unique. Villages in Cities takes us across North America—to New York, Boston, Burlington, Oakland, Jackson, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver—to show concrete examples of citizens taking back the land and claiming their right to secure housing. The book draws connections among these projects, examines their underlying causes, and connects them with a holistic “Right to the City” movement that is emerging internationally.
 
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Visions of Freedom: Critical Writings on Ecology and Anarchism
Brian Morris
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress HX833.M657 2018 | Dewey Decimal 320.57

Every ten years, notoriously eclectic thinker Brian Morris takes a year of sabbatical and launches out into another field about which he knows nothing. In the 1980s it was botany; in the 1990s, zoology; in the 2000s, entomology. The quintessential polymath, Morris has written on his incredible breadth of interests in wide-ranging essays, with subjects ranging from boxing to deep ecology to new-age gurus.
 
Collected here for the first time, Visions of Freedom brings together all of Morris’s concise yet diverse essays on politics, history, and ecology written since 1989. It includes book reviews, letters, and articles in the engaging and accessible style for which Morris is known. The thinkers he deals with are as diverse as Thomas Paine to C. L. R. James, from Karl Marx to Krishnamurti, from Max Weber to Naomi Klein. He also delves into the canon of classic anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Reclus, Proudhon, and Flores Magnon.
 
Taking a stance against the obscurantism of contemporary academic discourse, Morris’ writings demonstrate an interdisciplinary approach that moves seamlessly between topics, developing practical connections between scholarly debates and the pressing social, ecological and political issues of our times. 
 
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Weaving Another Future: Jineolojî—Readings in Women’s Science
Edited by Jineolojî Komitee Europa
Black Rose Books, 2021

A collection of essays on the intellectual foundation of the Kurdish women’s revolutionary movement.

Over the past decade, Western audiences have grown used to seeing images of Kurdish women in army fatigues fighting as part of Women’s Protection Units in the Syrian Civil War. But these striking images are not the whole story. Kurdish women’s militias are part of a revolution built on a sophisticated intellectual foundation that places the empowerment of women at the center of the struggle for political self-determination. Jineolojî is the name of this new social science, and Weaving Another Future is the first in a series of English-language books, collected and translated from the journal Jineolojî, that illustrate the scope and depth of this lively new discipline. In the wake of Western feminism that struggles to produce profound change in many women’s lives, the promise of Jineolojî is spreading to communities around the world. Weaving Another Future features essays on the goals and methodology of Jineolojî, matriarchal history and society, challenging patriarchal systems, building democratic autonomy outside the state, women's participation in emancipatory struggles, self-defense, and self-governance.
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Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger
Ulrike Klausmann and Marion Meinzerin
Black Rose Books, 1997

There have always been women among pirates and sea robbers. Metaphors of mysterious and destructive femininity may have perennially been assigned to the sea and its dangers, but the real women who sailed on ships steered them, sank with them, commanded them, even commandeered them have been ignored by a history written by and for patriarchal men.  Ample evidence of women pirates and even feminine piracy nonetheless abounds: beginning with ancient legends of Amazon sailors in several cultural traditions, and continuing uninterrupted through a wealth of confirmed historical figures, down to the present.  Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger is an account of piracy through three millennia, in histories of women and men sailing on four seas: the Chinese Straits, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. Writing with passion and humour, but without romanticizing, or ignoring the unsavoury side of some of their heroines, the authors turn history on its head. Nor do they forget the practical details, even including genuine recipes for shark and other delights.  The volume is introduced by Gabriel Kuhn's essay on anarchism and piracy, "Under the Death's Head." Considering the history of Caribbean piracy and drawing on Stirner and Foucault among others, Kuhn describes a breaking out of structured obedience, an escape from perpetual supervision, a plunge into unpredictability, danger, "everything that makes strong, free action."
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Words Of A Rebel
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1992
Library of Congress HX833.K7513 1992 | Dewey Decimal 335.83

Translated, with introduction, by George Woodcock

First published in 1885 in Paris, this collection of articles constitutes Kropotkin’s first book. Originally titled Paroles d’un Revolté, it includes his earliest works from period 1879 to 1882. In the succeeding years it was translated into Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Russian, and Chinese. Long-awaited in English, Words of a Rebel is the first complete translation.

A different work from the more familiar books of the older Kropotkin, it is a product of an anarchist agitator and it derives its interest as much from what it reveals about an important transitional phase in the development of anarchism as it does for what it shows us of Kropotkin himself.

Seeing revolution as a popular insurrection, in the broadest terms, Kropotkin believed that public wealth should belong to its producers and consumers and not to the State or the rich.

This volume of Kropotkin’s articles was translated from the French by George Woodcock. A celebrated author, Woodcock is also an authority on the life and works of Peter Kropotkin and as a result, Words of a Rebel is not just a translation, but a scholarly work as well.

Table of Contents:

Introduction by George Woodcock

Introduction to the First French Edition by Elisée Reclus

I. The Situation Today

II. The Breakdown of the State

III. The Inevitability of Revolution

IV. The Coming Revolution

V. Political Rights

VI. To the Young

VII. War

VIII. Revolutionary Minorities

IX. Order

X. The Commune

XI. The Paris Commune

XII. The Agrarian Question

XIII. Representative Government

XIV. Law and Authority

XV. Revolutionary Government

XVI. All of Us Socialists!

XVII. The Spirit of Revolt

XVIII. Theory and Practice

XIX. Expropriation

Notes


1992: 229 pages
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Year 501: The Conquest Continues
Noam Chomsky
Black Rose Books, 1997

A book by Noam Chomsky.
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Your Freedom and Mine: Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan's Turkey
Edited by Thomas Jeffrey Miley
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress DR435.K87Y68 2018 | Dewey Decimal 956.100491597

"Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts… I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated."—From a letter by Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment, February 10, 1985

A revolutionary imprisoned on an island fortress may hold the key to peace in the Middle East. The leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, is considered by many to be the “Kurdish Mandela”, courageously issuing proposals for peace even from his prison cell. His ideas on democracy, women's liberation, and freedom have even inspired the remarkable Rojava Revolution in northern Syria. As Turkey descended into tyranny and Syria exploded in civil war, a peace delegation of European politicians, academics, and journalists, led by Nelson Mandela's lawyer and Supreme Court judge Essa Moosa, repeatedly attempted to go to meet with Öcalan at his prison on Imrali Island. Your Freedom and Mine tells the story of these momentous delegations.
 
The book opens with an informative historical overview of the Kurdish Question, leading up until the optimistic opening—and eventual bitter failure—of the peace process in Turkey. It includes official documents and reports from the Imrali Delegations in Istanbul and Diyarbakir/Amed, which involved in-depth interviews with Kurdish and Turkish politicians, media, and civil society regarding the degenerating political and human rights situation. The final section is a collection of testimonials from delegation participants. Your Freedom and Mine offers crucial insight into the dramatic history and current reality of the Kurdish struggle for recognition and peace in Turkey. 
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99 scholarly books by Black Rose Books
1917
Revolution in Russia and its Aftermath
Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Murray Bookchin, and Ida Mett
Black Rose Books, 2018
Upon their scandalous deportation from the United States in 1919, famous anarchist writers and activists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were greeted like heroes by the new Bolshevik government in Russia. Berkman described it as “the most sublime day of my life.” And yet he would flee the country after only two years. Belarus-born Ida Mett, who went through a similar experience at the time, also wrote a harrowing account of the Red Army’s brutal massacre at the Kronstadt Uprising before she too went into exile. How did each of these figures become so deeply disillusioned with Russia so quickly? And why, within a few years, did they all leave the country forever?
 
1917 offers a unique alternative perspective on the early years of the Russian Revolution through the narrative perspective of these three eyewitnesses. Featuring an introduction by Murray Bookchin, this book emphasizes the rarely discussed anarchist hopes for a democratic October revolution, while also critiquing the increasingly authoritarian responses of Bolshevik leaders at the time. Published for the centennial of the Russian revolutions, 1917 contains four essays by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Ida Mett, and Bookchin, as well as a poem by Dan Georgakas, that analyze, assess, celebrate, and bemoan both the wild successes and the bitter failures of the revolution. 
 
[more]
1968
On the Edge of World Revolution
Edited by Philipp Gassert and Martin Klimke
Black Rose Books, 2018
It was a year of seismic social and political change. With the wildfire of uprisings and revolutions that shook governments and halted economies in 1968, the world would never be the same again. Restless students, workers, women, and national liberation movements arose as a fierce global community with radically democratic instincts that challenged war, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy with unprecedented audacity. Fast forward fifty years and 1968 has become a powerful myth that lingers in our memory.
 
Released for the fiftieth anniversary of that momentous year, this second edition of Philipp Gassert’s and Martin Klimke’s seminal 1968 presents an extremely wide ranging survey across the world. Short chapters, written by local eye-witnesses and historical experts, cover the tectonic events in thirty-nine countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and the Middle East to give a truly global view. Included are forty photographs throughout the book that illustrate the drama of events described in each chapter. This edition also has the transcript of a panel discussion organized for the fortieth anniversary of 1968 with eyewitnesses Norman Birnbaum, Patty Lee Parmalee, and Tom Hayden and moderated by the book's editors.
 
Visually engaging and comprehensive, this new edition is an extremely accessible introduction to a vital moment of global activism in humanity’s history, perfect for a high school or early university textbook, a resource for the general reader, or a starting point for researchers. 
 
[more]
1984 And After
Roussopoulos Hewitt
Black Rose Books, 1987

Advancing Urban Rights
Equality and Diversity in the City
Edited by Eva Garcia-Checua and Lorenzo Vidal
Black Rose Books, 2021
How can the set of rights that underpin the notion of the “right to the city” be advanced? In seeking answers to this question over several decades, social mobilizations have been assembled and new political and legal frameworks promoted. New interpretations and political articulations of the right to the city, especially those that have emerged since the end of the 2000s, encourage us to view it through the lens of identity politics. They propose that attention should be given to the diversity of the social groups that live in urban environments, whose voice and agency must be recognized in the construction of the city in the interests of equality and social justice.
​
Addressing these issues not only involves recognizing and valuing the subjects that have historically been marginalized in the construction of urban space, both physical and symbolic. It also means bearing in mind that the city materializes and is experienced in a different way by the different groups that inhabit it through their practices, uses of it and, in short, how their daily life takes shape. Advancing Urban Rights will help both concerned citizens and policy makers identify and analyze redistribution and recognition policies, institutional change, and social production of the city in an increasingly urban world.
[more]
Against Nihilism
Nietzsche meets Dostoevsky
Maia Johnson-Stepenberg
Black Rose Books, 2018
Described by Thomas Mann as “brothers in spirit, but tragically grotesque companions in misfortune,” Nietzsche and Dostoevsky remain towering figures in the intellectual development of European modernity. Maia Johnson-Stepenberg’s accessible new introduction to these philosophers compares their writings on key topics such as criminality, Christianity, and the figure of the “outsider” to reveal the urgency and contemporary resonance of their shared struggle against nihilism. Against Nihilism also considers nihilism in the context of current political and social struggles, placing Nietzsche and Dostoevsky’s contributions at the heart of important contemporary debates regarding community, identity, and meaning. Inspired by class discussions with her students and aimed at first-team readers of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Against Nihilism provides an accessible, unique comparative study of these two key thinkers. 
 
[more]
Anarchism Volume One
A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One – From Anarchy to Anarchism
Edited by Robert Graham
Black Rose Books, 2005
Click here for orders in the UK & Europe.

Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas is a comprehensive and far-ranging collection of anarchist writings from the classical era to 1939. Edited and introduced by noted anarchist scholar Robert Graham, this incomparable volume includes the definitive texts from the anarchist tradition of political thought. It deals both with the positive ideas and proposals the anarchists tried to put into practice and with their critiques of the authoritarian theories and practices confronting them.

ROBERT GRAHAM has written extensively on the history of anarchist ideas. He is the author of "The Role of Contract in Anarchist Ideology," in For Anarchism, edited by David Goodway, and he wrote the introduction to the 1989 edition of Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, originally published in 1851. He has been doing research and writing on the historical development of anarchist ideas for over 20 years and is a well respected commentator in the field.

"Robert Graham is an outstanding scholar of anarchism and has made an exceptionally stimulating choice of texts: some familiar, others--especially those from East Asia--entirely unknown to me. The publication of this first instalment of what promises to be a notable anthology is an important event for anarchists." - David Goodway, Anarchist Historian, University of Leeds, UK

"Will definitely meet the need for a comprehensive study of all the strands, ideas and themes of anarchist and libertarian thought." - Stuart Christie, Anarchist Writer/Publisher

"An excellent and long-overdue anthology of anarchist writings. It shows the depth, diversity and relevance of anarchist thought and action. Highly recommended." - Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

"This judicious collection is admirable in its chronological, geographical, and thematic range. There is nothing comparable in presenting anarchist and libertarian responses both to the challenges of theory and to those of practices forged in the fires of historical crises." - Wayne Thorpe, The Workers Themselves: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913-1923

"Admirably displays the range and inventiveness of anarchist approaches." - Colin Ward, Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction and Anarchy in Action


Table of Contents

Preface

CHAPTER 1: EARLY TEXTS ON SERVITUDE AND FREEDOM

1. Bao Jingyan: Neither Lord Nor Subject (300 C.E.)

2. Etienne de la Boetie: On Voluntary Servitude (1552)

3. Gerrard Winstanley: The New Law of Righteousness (1649)

CHAPTER 2: ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTION

4. William Godwin: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793-97)

5. Jean Varlet: The Explosion (1794)

6. Sylvain Maréchal: Manifesto of the Equals (1796)

CHAPTER 3: INDUSTRIALIZATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIALISM

7. Charles Fourier: Attractive Labour (1822-37)

8. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: What is Property (1840)

9. Proudhon: The System of Economic Contradictions (1846)

CHAPTER 4: REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS AND ACTION

10. Michael Bakunin, The Reaction in Germany (1842)

11. Max Stirner: The Ego and Its Own (1844)

12. Proudhon: The General Idea of the Revolution (1851)

13. Anselme Bellegarrigue: Anarchy is Order (1850)

14. Joseph Déjacque: The Revolutionary Question (1854)

15. Francisco Pi y Margall: Reaction and Revolution (1854)

16. Carlo Pisacane: On Revolution (1857)

17. Joseph Déjacque: On Being Human (1857)

CHAPTER 5: THE ORIGINS OF THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT AND THE INTERNATIONAL

18. Proudhon: On Federalism (1863/65)

19. Statutes of the First International (1864-1866)

20. Bakunin: Socialism and the State (1867)

21. Bakunin: Program of the International Brotherhood (1868)

22. Bakunin: What is the State (1869)

23. Bakunin: The Illusion of Universal Suffrage (1870)

24. Bakunin: On Science and Authority (1871)

CHAPTER 6: THE CONFLICT IN THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL

25. Bakunin: The Organization of the International (1871)

26. The Sonvillier Circular (1871)

27. The St. Imier Congress (1872)

CHAPTER 7: THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR AND THE PARIS COMMUNE

28. Bakunin: Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis (1870)

29. Bakunin: The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State (1871)

30. Louise Michel: In Defence of the Commune (1871)

31. Peter Kropotkin: The Paris Commune (1881)

CHAPTER 8: ANARCHIST COMMUNISM

32. Carlo Cafiero: Anarchy and Communism (1880)

33. Kropotkin: The Conquest of Bread (1892)

34. Kropotkin: Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898)

35. Luigi Galleani: The End of Anarchism (1907)

CHAPTER 9: ANARCHY AND ANARCHISM

36. José Llunas Pujols: What is Anarchy (1882)

37. Charlotte Wilson: Anarchism (1886)

38. Élisée Reclus: Anarchy (1894)

39. Jean Grave: Moribund Society and Anarchy (1893)

40. Gustav Landauer: Anarchism in Germany (1895)

41. Kropotkin: On Anarchism (1896)

42. E. Armand: Mini-Manual of the Anarchist Individualist (1911)

CHAPTER 10: PROPAGANDA BY THE DEED

43. Paul Brousse: Propaganda By the Deed (1877)

44. Carlo Cafiero: Action (1880)

45. Kropotkin: Expropriation (1885)

46. Jean Grave: Means and Ends (1893)

47. Leo Tolstoy: On Non-violent Resistance (1900)

48. Errico Malatesta: Violence as a Social Factor (1895)

49. Gustav Landauer: Destroying the State by Creating Socialism (1910/15)

50. Voltairine de Cleyre: Direct Action (1912)

CHAPTER 11: LAW AND MORALITY

51. William Godwin: Of Law (1797)

52. Kropotkin: Law and Authority (1886)

53. Errico Malatesta: The Duties of the Present Hour (1894)

54. Kropotkin: Mutual Aid (1902) and Anarchist Morality (1890)

CHAPTER 12: ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

55. The Pittsburgh Proclamation (1883)

56. Fernand Pelloutier: Anarchism and the Workers' Unions (1895)

57. Antonio Pellicer Paraire: The Organization of Labour (1900)

58. The Workers' Federation of the Uruguayan Region (FORU): Declarations from the 3rd Congress (1911)

59. Emma Goldman: On Syndicalism (1913)

60. Pierre Monatte and Errico Malatesta: Syndicalism - For and Against (1907)

CHAPTER 13: ART AND ANARCHY

61. Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

62. Bernard Lazare: Anarchy and Literature (1894)

63. Jean Grave: The Artist as Equal, Not Master (1899)

CHAPTER 14: ANARCHY AND EDUCATION

64. Bakunin: Integral Education (1869)

65. Francisco Ferrer: The Modern School (1908)

66. Sébastien Faure: Libertarian Education (1910)

CHAPTER 15: WOMEN, LOVE AND MARRIAGE

67. Bakunin: Against Patriarchal Authority (1873)

68. Louise Michel: Women's Rights (1886)

69. Carmen Lareva: Free Love (1896)

70. Emma Goldman: Marriage (1897), Prostitution and Love (1910)

CHAPTER 16: THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

71. Voltairine de Cleyre: The Mexican Revolution (1911)

72. Praxedis Guerrero: To Die On Your Feet (1910)

73. Ricardo Flores Magón: Land and Liberty (1911-1918)

CHAPTER 17: WAR AND REVOLUTION IN EUROPE

74. Élisée Reclus: Evolution and Revolution (1891)

75. Tolstoy: Compulsory Military Service (1893)

76. Jean Grave: Against Militarism and Colonialism (1893)

77. Élisée Reclus: The Modern State (1905)

78. Otto Gross: Overcoming Cultural Crisis (1913)

79. Gustav Landauer: For Socialism (1911)

80. Malatesta: Anarchists Have Forgotten Their Principles (1914)

81. International Anarchist Manifesto Against War (1915)

82. Emma Goldman: The Road to Universal Slaughter (1915)

CHAPTER 18: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

83. Gregory Maksimov: The Soviets (1917)

84. All-Russian Conference of Anarcho-Syndicalists: Resolution on Trade Unions and Factory Committees (1918)

85. Manifestos of the Makhnovist Movement (1920)

86. Peter Arshinov: The Makhnovshchina and Anarchism (1921)

87. Voline: The Unknown Revolution (1947)

88. Alexander Berkman: The Bolshevik Myth (1925)

89. Emma Goldman: The Transvaluation of Values (1923)

CHAPTER 19: ANARCHISM IN LATIN AMERICA

90. Comrades of the Chaco: Anarchist Manifesto (1892)

91. Manuel González Prada: Our Indians (1904)

92. Rafael Barrett: Striving for Anarchism (1909/10)

93. Teodoro Antilli: Class Struggle and Social Struggle (1924)

94. López Arango and Abad de Santillán: Anarchism in the Labour Movement (1925)

95. The American Continental Workers' Association (1929)

CHAPTER 20: CHINESE ANARCHISM

96. He Zhen: Women's Liberation (1907)

97. Chu Minyi: Universal Revolution (1907)

98. Wu Zhihui: Education as Revolution (1908)

99. Shifu: Goals and Methods of the Anarchist-Communist Party (1914)

100. Huang Lingshuang: Writings on Evolution, Freedom and Marxism (1917-29)

101. Li Pei Kan (Ba Jin): On Theory and Practice (1921-1927)

CHAPTER 21: ANARCHISM IN JAPAN AND KOREA

102. Kôtoku Shûsui: Letter from Prison (1910)

103. Ôsugi Sakae: Social Idealism (1920)

104. Itô Noe: The Facts of Anarchy (1921)

105. Shin Chaeho: Declaration of the Korean Revolution (1923)

106. Hatta Shûzô: On Syndicalism (1927)

107. Kubo Yuzuru: On Class Struggle and the Daily Struggle (1928)

108. The Talhwan: What We Advocate (1928)

109. Takamure Itsue: A Vision of Anarchist Love (1930)

110. Japanese Libertarian Federation: What To Do About War (1931)

CHAPTER 22: THE INTERWAR YEARS

111. Gustav Landauer: Revolution of the Spirit (1919)

112. Errico Malatesta: An Anarchist Program (1920)

113. Luigi Fabbri: Fascism: The Preventive Counter-Revolution (1921)

114. The IWA: Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922)

115. The Platform and its Critics (1926-27)

116. Voline: Anarchist Synthesis

117. Alexander Berkman: The ABC of Communist Anarchism (1927)

118. Marcus Graham: Against the Machine (1934)

119. Wilhelm Reich and the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1935)

120. Bart de Ligt: The Conquest of Violence (1937)

121. Rudolf Rocker: Nationalism and Culture (1937)

CHAPTER 23: THE SPANISH REVOLUTION

122. Félix Martí Ibáñez: The Sexual Revolution (1934)

123. Lucía Sánchez Saornil: The Question of Feminism (1935)

124. The CNT: Resolutions from the Zaragoza Congress (1936)

125. Diego Abad de Santillán: The Libertarian Revolution (1937)

126. Gaston Leval: Libertarian Democracy

127. Albert Jensen: The CNT-FAI, the State and Government (1938)

128. Diego Abad de Santillán: A Return to Principle (1938)

CHAPTER 24: EPILOGUE AND PROLOGUE TO VOLUME 2

129. Emma Goldman: A Life Worth Living (1934)

130. Herbert Read: Poetry and Anarchism (1938)

131. Malatesta: Toward Anarchy

2005: 536 pages, bibliography and index
[more]
Anarchism Volume Two
A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume Two – The Emergence of a New Anarchism
Edited by Robert Graham
Black Rose Books, 2007
Continuing where Volume One left off,this anthology of anarchist writings, broad in its geographical and intellectual scope, documents both continuity and change in anarchist ideas since the Spanish revolution and civil war. Topics covered include anti-capitalism and global justice movements, opposition to war, ecology and anarchism, the relevance of syndicalism, libertarian communism, anarcha-feminism, personal and sexual liberation, libertarian education, participatory democracy, direct action and affinity groups, technology and freedom, anthropology and anarchy,art and the utopian imagination, bureaucracy, state and empire, resistance and revolution, post-modernism, and philosophical anarchism.

In addition to English language material from England and North America, the book includes translations from Africa, India, China, Latin America, and Europe, much of which has never appeared before in English. Contributors include Noam Chomsky, Murray Bookchin,Emma Goldman, George Woodcock, Marie Louise Berneri, Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Martin Buber, Paul Goodman, Carole Pateman, Colin Ward, Paul Feyerabend, Pierre Clastres, Chaia Heller, Ivan Illich, Daniel Guerin, Luce Fabbri and many more.

ROBERT GRAHAM has been writing on the history of anarchist ideas and contemporary anarchist theory for over 20 years.In 2005, he published Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism 300CE to 1939(Black Rose Books)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION: MAKING SENSE OF ANARCHISM by Davide Turcato

CHAPTER 1: ANTI-MILITARISM, WAR & REVOLUTION

1. Herbert Read: The Philosophy of Anarchism (1940)
2. Emma Goldman: The Individual, Society and the State (1940)
3. The Romande Anarchist Federation: Coming to Grips With War (1939)
4. Marie Louise Berneri: Constructive Policy versus Destructive War (1940-43)
5. Jean Sauliere, Voline et. al.: Appeal to All Workers (1943)
6. Italian Anarchist Federation: Act for Yourselves (1945)
7. Bulgarian Anarchist Manifesto (1945)
8. French Anarchist Federation: The Issues of the Day (1945)
9. Korean Anarchist Manifesto (1948)
10. International Anarchist Manifesto (1948)
11. Paul Goodman: Drawing the Line (1945)
12. Alex Comfort: Peace and Disobedience (1946)
13. Dwight Macdonald: The Root Is Man (1946)

CHAPTER 2: THE WILL TO DREAM

14. Ethel Mannin:The Will to Dream (1944)
15. Marie Louis Berneri: Journey Through Utopia (1949)
16. Martin Buber: Paths in Utopia (1949)
17. Paul & Percival Goodman: Communities (1947)
18. Giancarlo de Carlo: Rebuilding Community (1948)

CHAPTER 3: ART AND FREEDOM

19. Herbert Read:The Freedom of the Artist (1943)
20. Alex Comfort: Art and Social Responsibility (1946)
21. Holley Cantine: Art: Play and Its Perversions (1947)
22. Paul-Émile Borduas: Global Refusal (1948)
23. André Breton: The Black Mirror of Anarchism (1952)
24. Julian Beck: Storming the Barricades (1964)
25. Living Theatre Declaration (1970)

CHAPTER 4: RESISTING THE NATION STATE

26. Alex Comfort:Authority and Delinquency (1950)
27. Geoffrey Ostergaard: The Managerial Revolution (1954)
28. Mohamed Saïl: The Kabyle Mind-Set (1951)
29. Maurice Fayolle: From Tunis to Casablanca (1954)
30. André Prudhommeaux: The Libertarians and Politics (1954)
31. Noir et Rouge: Refusing the Nation-State (1957-62)
32. Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakesh Narayan: From Socialism to Sarvodaya (1957)
33. Vernon Richards: Banning the Bomb (1958-59)
34. Nicolas Walter: Direct Action and the New Pacifism (1962)
35. Paul Goodman: "Getting into Power" (1962)

CHAPTER 5: CREATING A COUNTER-CULTURE

36. Herbert Read:Anarchism and Education (1944-47)
37. Paul Goodman: A Public Dream of Universal Disaster
38. L'Impulso: Resistance or Revolution (1950)
39. David Thoreau Wieck: The Realization of Freedom (1953)
40. David Dellinger: Communalism (1954)
41. A.J. Baker: Anarchism Without Ends (1960)
42: Gary Snyder: Buddhist Anarchism (1961)
43. Nicolas Walter: Anarchism and Religion (1991)
44. C. George Benello: Wasteland Culture (1967)
45. Louis Mercier Vega: Yesterday's Societies and Today's (1970)
46. Joel Spring: Liberating Education (1975)

CHAPTER 6: RESURGENT ANARCHISM

47. Lain Diez:Towards a Systematization of Anarchist Thought (1964)
48. Murray Bookchin: Ecology and Anarchy (1965)
49. Daniel Guérin: Anarchism Reconsidered (1965-66)
50. The Provos: PROVOcation (1966)
51. The Cohn-Bendit Brothers: It Is for Yourself that You Make the Revolution(1968)
52. Jacobo Prince: Fighting for Freedom (1969)
53. Diego Abad de Santillán: Anarchism Without Adjectives (1969)
54. Nicolas Walter: About Anarchism (1969)
55. Noam Chomsky: Notes on Anarchism (1970)
56. Robert Paul Wolff: In Defence of Anarchism (1970)
57. Paul Goodman: Freedom and Autonomy (1972)

CHAPTER 7: FORMS OF FREEDOM

58. Philip Sansom:Syndicalism Restated (1951)
59. Benjamin Péret: The Factory Committee (1952)
60. Comunidad del Sur: The Production of Self-Management (1969)
61. Maurice Joyeaux: Self-Management, Syndicalism and Factory Councils (1973)
62. Murray Bookchin: The Forms of Freedom (1968)
63. Colin Ward: Anarchy as a Theory of Organization (1966-1973)

CHAPTER 8: SOCIETY AGAINST STATE

64. Pierre Clasters:Society Against the State (1974)
65. Michael Taylor: Anarchy, the State and Cooperation (1976)
66. Louis Mercier Vega: The Modern State (1970)
67. Nico Berti: The New Masters (1976)
68. Noam Chomsky: Intellectuals and the State (1977)

CHAPTER 9: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

69. George Woodcock:The Tyranny of the Clock (1944)
70. Paul Goodman: Science and Technology (1960)
71. Paul Feyerabend: Against Method (1975)
72. Richard Kostelanetx: Technoanarchism (1968)
73. Ivan Illich: Political Inversion (1976)
74: Murray Bookchin: Ecotechnology and Ecocommunities (1976-82)

CHAPTER 10: SEXUAL REVOLUTION

75. Marie Louise Berneri: Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Revolution (1945)
76. Daniel Guérin: Sexual Liberation
77. Paul Goodman: The Politics of Being Queer (1969)
78. Peggy Kornegger: Anarchism: The Feminist Connection (1975)
79. Carol Ehrlich: Anarchism, Feminism and Situationism (1977)

535 pages, bibliography, index
[more]
Anarchist Collectives
Sam Dolgoff
Black Rose Books, 1973
The Anarchist Collectives reveals a very different understanding of the nature of radical social change and the means of achieving it.

Sam Dolgoff, editor of the best anthology of Bakunin’s writings, has now produced an excellent documentary history of the Anarchist collective in Spain. Although there is a vast literature on the Spanish Civil War, this is the first book in English that is devoted to the experiments in workers’ self-management, both urban and rural, which constituted one of the most remarkable social revolutions in modern history. - Paul Avrich

The eyewitness reports and commentary presented in this highly important study reveal a different understanding of the nature of socialism and the means for achieving it. - Noam Chomsky

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Murray Bookchin

Part One: Background

1. The Spanish Revolution
The Two Revolutions
The Trend Towards Workers’ Self-Management

2. The Libertarian Tradition
The Rural Collectivist Tradition
The Anarchist Influence
The Political and Economic Organization of Society

3. Historical Notes
The Prologue to Revolution
The Counter-Revolution and the Destruction of the Collectives

4. The Limitations of the Revolution

Part Two: The Social Revolution

5. The Economics of Revolution

Economic Structure and Coordination
A Note on the Difficult Problems of Reconstruction
Money and Exchange

6. Workers’ Self-Management in Industry

7. Urban Collectivization
Collectivization in Catalonia
The Collectivization of the Metal and Munitions Industry
The Collectivization of the Optical Industry
The Socialization of Health Services
Industrial Collectivization in Alcoy
Control of Industries in the North

8. The Revolution of the Land

9. The Coordination of Collectives
The Peasant Federation of Levant
The Aragon Federation of Collectives: The First Congress

10. The Rural Collectives
A Journey Through Aragon
The Collectivization in Graus
Libertarian Communism in Alcora
The Collective in Binefar
Miralcampo and Azuqueca
Collectivization in Carcagente
Collectivization in Magdalena de Pulpis
The Collective in Mas de Las Matas

11. An Evaluation of the Anarchist Collectives
The Characteristics of the Libertarian Collectives

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Appendix
Photographs and Posters
[more]
The Anatomist of Power
Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority
Costas Despiniadis
Black Rose Books, 2018
Few twentieth-century writers remain as potent as Franz Kafka—one of the rare figures to maintain both a major presence in the academy and on the shelves of general readers. Yet, remarkably, no work has yet fully focused on his politics and anti-authoritarian sensibilities. The Anatomist of Power: Franz Kafka and the Critique of Authority is a fascinating new look at his widely known novels and stories (including The Trial, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Amerika), portraying him as a powerful critic of authority, bureaucracy, capitalism, law, patriarchy, and prisons. Making deft use of Kafka’s diaries, his friends’ memoirs, and his original sketches, Costas Despiniadis addresses his active participation in Prague’s anarchist circles, his wide interest in anarchist authors, his skepticism about the Russian Revolution, and his ambivalent relationship with utopian Zionism. The portrait of Kafka that emerges is striking and fresh—rife with insights and a refusal to accept the structures of power that dominated his society.
 
[more]
Another City is Possible with Participatory Budgeting
Yves Cabannes
Black Rose Books, 2018
Participatory budgeting gives people real power to determine the future of their cities. It’s a democratic process where ordinary community members directly decide how to spend the public budget. It explicitly reaffirms the central place of collective deliberation for participatory democracy, and it also can contribute to the transformation of the city into urban commons. Though participatory budgeting was only born in 1989, it has since been practiced more than 2000 times in more than 45 countries around the world—groundbreaking success for a process that is one of the rare authentic democratic innovations in the past 30 years.
 
In this book, Yves Cabannes offers examples from five continents of participatory budgeting in practice, outlining the successes and challenges of thirteen case studies from the United States, Brazil, France, Portugal, Spain, China, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mozambique, and Cameroon. As much a best-of-guide as a how-to-manual for democratizing municipal finances, the book charts the unique trajectory of participatory budgeting, asserting its rich potential for realizing radical democratic goals and deepening democracy. The book also features a foreword by Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, the city with the largest and most ambitious participatory budget in history.
[more]
Anthropology and Dialectical Naturalism
A Philosophical Manifesto
Brian Morris
Black Rose Books, 2020
Is the world just a cultural construct where people create their own realities? In this illuminating and wide-ranging philosophical treatise, Brian Morris critiques broad swathes of recent theory as he seeks to reclaim anthropology as a historical social science. He achieves this by grounding it within a metaphysic of “dialectical naturalism” or “evolutionary realism”—a tradition long ignored by academic philosophy. 
 
After reviewing the anthropological background of this worldview—the Greeks and the Enlightenment—Morris explores two essential themes. First, he critically assesses the main forms of dialectical naturalism, including Darwin’s evolutionary theory, Marx’s historical materialism, and the hylorealism of the philosopher-scientist Mario Bunge. Second, he offers a strong plea to retain the dual heritage of anthropology as a historical science that combines both humanism and naturalism. A powerful philosophical manifesto, the book cogently upholds dialectical naturalism as the most grounding philosophy for anthropology and the social sciences.
 
[more]
Art, Space, Ecology
Two Views-Twenty Interviews
John K. Grande
Black Rose Books, 2018
In Art, Space, Ecology, internationally renowned curator and critic John K. Grande interviews twenty major contemporary artists whose works engage with the natural environment. Whether their medium is sculpture, nature interventions, performance, body art, or installation, these discussions, complemented by eighty stunning photographs, reveal the artists’ diverse backgrounds and methods, expressions and realizations.Ultimately, the natural world serves as a canvas to explore the intersections of art, space, and the environment, thereby raising questions about our relationship with landscape itself. The essence of the art form is a dynamic interactivity, and the dialogues between Grande and the artists mirror the encounter of object and environment, artist and audience, society and nature.  This work is rounded out with an engaging introduction by writer and curator Edward Lucie-Smith, who sets the stage for some of the most insightful and compelling discussions on art to be found. 
 
[more]
Bakunin
Philosophy of Freedom
Brian Morris
Black Rose Books, 1993

Balance Art & Nature Revised Edition
John K. Grande
Black Rose Books, 2003
Believing that artistic expression can and does play an important role in changing the way we perceive our relation to the world we live in, art critic John Grande takes an in-depth look at the work of some very unusual environmental artists in the United States, Canada, and -Europe. Dealing with everything from materials to the politics of curatorship, from the permanence of art works to the artist's role as cultural critic, Balance Art and Nature takes theory into action as it critically examines the works of Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Armand Vaillancourt, Bill Reid, Carl Beam, Kevin Kelly, Ana Mendieta, James Carl, Patrick Dougherty, Keith Haring, and others. What emerges is a viable socio-environmental framework for evaluating contemporary art and insights into art's actual and potential roles. "Grande's commentaries represent an important contribution to the theory of art."--Claude Levi-Strauss "A call to reawaken creativity in this time of alienation."--Antony Gormley "Encourages us to rethink what it means to be an artist in a time of global eco-crisis."--Suzi Gablik, The Re-enchantment of Art "Makes unexpected connections giving new insights into contemporary art."--Public Art Review "Grande's book contains a lot of ideas, all of which are thought-provoking."--Globe and Mail "Details makes this book convincing."--Books In Canada "Grande's ideas and style are fresh, sincere, intuitive, lively and compelling."--Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics "Offers interesting parallels between different aspects of public art."--Espace Sculptur Writer and art critic John Grande's reviews and feature -articles have been published in art magazines and catalogues internationally. He is author of Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books), Nils-Udo: Art with Nature (Wienand Verlag), and Art Nature Dialogues (SUNY Press).

Library of Congress subject headings for this publication:
Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Art, Modern -- 20th century.
Nature (Aesthetics)
[more]
Buzz Kill
The Corporatization of Cannabis
Michael R. Devillaer
Black Rose Books, 2023
A wide-ranging exploration of the legalization of cannabis in Canada and what we can learn from it.

Cronyism, greed, and corruption trumped social justice and public health in Canada’s legalization of cannabis. How did we get here? Where are we going? More humane drug policy—which prioritizes public health over corporate profits—is possible. Canada legalized the sale of recreational cannabis in 2018. Buzz Kill recounts the political and corporate collusion in creating an industry out of thin air that supplanted an illicit century-old industry. Drawing on lessons from alcohol and tobacco regulation in Canada and the United States, this book shows that, rather than basing policy choices on evidence, Canada’s political elites created a new regulated industry that would line their own pockets.
[more]
A Citizen's Guide to City Politics
Montreal
Edited by Eric Shragge, Jason Prince, and Mostafa Henaway
Black Rose Books, 2021
From Montreal’s grassroots activists, city planners, and engaged citizens, a guide to building radical municipal power from the ground up.

World cities face persistent tension between the pull of globalization and the needs of citizens. Conventional political parties present milquetoast solutions that accommodate the interests of business. Meanwhile, citizens in cafes, meeting halls, on the streets, and now in virtual forums are rising to the challenge of imagining new and radical municipal policy from the ground up. This book explores the future of Montreal’s citizen lead movements at a moment defined by the threats of pandemic, austerity, housing speculation and insecurity, and racism. It pairs contemporary analysis with an exploration of Montreal’s rich municipal history. The editors of A Citizen’s Guide to City Politics gathered more than twenty activists, urban planners, and thinkers to address the major problems facing Montrealers and propose alternatives from a citizen's perspective. Municipal movements everywhere will see their own struggles reflected in this guide and will find inspiration for debate and action.
[more]
Close of Play
President, Prince, and Cricket
William Walcott
Black Rose Books, 2019
In this allegorical excursion, William Walcott explores the intersections between United States politics and the game of cricket in a book reminiscent of C. L. R. James’s classic Beyond a Boundary. In Close of Play, Walcott highlights the careers of former US president Barack Obama and the Trinidadian cricket and cultural phenom Brian Lara—one of the greatest batsmen of all time, who Obama once called “the Michael Jordan of cricket.” Readers are invited to explore the parallel poetics of politics and sport through the life and words of these luminaries, both of whom promised to deliver far-reaching social change yet found themselves “on the back foot.”
 
In his analysis, Walcott delves into matters of Caribbean and American identity, political leadership, oratory, and the blending of cricket vocabulary into political commentary. He also challenges us to understand the sociological links between international sport, socio-economic inequality, and racial politics. This book is a fascinating journey into the world of global sociopolitical life and the curiosities of language embedded in cricket and political play, both of which constitute enormous sectors within a multibillion dollar “sticky wicket” of transnational capitalism.
 
[more]
Common Futures
Social Transformation and Political Ecology
Yavor Tarinski and Alexandros Schismenos
Black Rose Books, 2021
What does the future hold? Is the desertification of the planet, driven by state and corporate authority, the final horizon of history? Is the dystopian future implied by the systemic degradation of nature and society inescapable? From marginal activist groups to governments and interstate organizations, all appear to be concerned with what the future of our shared world will look like. Yet even amid the ongoing global crisis caused by capitalism, the potential of a different, radically rooted future has also appeared.
 
Common Futures explores the global emergence of twenty-first-century social movements, opposed to capitalism and state authority. These movements, Yavor Tarinski and Alexandros Schismenos show, transcend traditional political forms of organization and try to form autonomous networks premised on direct democracy and solidarity. The authors identify the importance of grassroots movements, which can bring radical change and create a more democratic and ecological future.

Common Futures examines the social and political roots of the environmental crisis and the relationship between ecology and direct democracy. But Tarinski and Schismenos go beyond the analysis of crises, contemporary struggles, and social movements: Common Futures also clarifies the conditions for the re-creation of free public time and space and point to practical steps that we can take to alleviate the problems of our future.
[more]
The Conquest of Bread
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1990
The Conquest of Bread presents the clearest statement of Kropotkin’s anarchist social doctrines. It possesses a lucidity of style not often found in books on social themes. In Kropotkin’s own description, the book is “a study of the needs of humanity, and the economic means to satisfy them”. Taking the Paris Commune as its model, its paramount aim is to show how a social revolution can be made and how a society, organized on libertarian lines, can then be built on the ruins of the old. Form Stirner’s individualism, Proudhon’s mutualism and Bakunin’s collectivism Kropotkin proceeded to the principle of “anarchist communism”, by which private property and inequality of income would give way to the free distribution of goods and services. In summing up his beliefs he said, “The anarchists conceive a society in which all the mutual relations of its members are regulated… by mutual agreements between the members of the society and by a sum of social customs and habits…continually developing and continually readjusting in accordance with the ever-growing requirements of a free life stimulated by the progress of science, invention and the steady growth of higher ideals.”  In his introduction, George Woodcock throws a modern light on the significance and scope of Kropotkin’s work.
[more]
The Cuban Revolution
A Critical Perspective
Sam Dolgoff
Black Rose Books, 1976
Sam Dolgoff analyzes the Cuban Revolution.  He presents a historical perspective that arrives at new insights into social and political change. Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990) played an important role in anarchist movements since the early 1920s. He was a member of the Chicago Free Society Group, and co-founded the New York Libertarian League.
[more]
The Curious One
Peter Kropotkin's Siberian Diaries
Edited by Christopher Coquard
Black Rose Books, 2021
Peter Kropotkin was one of the most influential Russian thinkers and activists and, though born a prince, is considered the architect of anarcho-communism. The year 2021 will mark the centennial of Kropotkin’s death, which this book commemorates through the first-ever English edition of his Siberian diaries.

Aged nineteen and freshly graduated at the top of his class from a prestigious military academy, Kropotkin decided to be posted to the distant backwater of Siberia, to the shock of his friends and family. There, he idealistically pursued political reforms and also participated in various ground-breaking geographic surveys, keeping a diary that recorded his experiences. Ten years later, after tenuously living a double life in the royal court and radical circles, the Tsarist Secret Police arrested him in St. Petersburg and seized his papers, including these Siberian diaries. This arrest, and his dramatic escape from prison, would spark the beginning of his reputation as one of the most famous anarchists ever. He would then spend forty years in exile before returning to revolutionary Russia where he would become increasingly critical of the Bolsheviks.

First published posthumously in 1923 in Russia, Kropotkin’s Siberian diaries take us on his five-year journey from St. Petersburg to Siberia, via Moscow, Kaluga, Chita, and Irkutsk. These pages, published here for the first time in English, immerse us in Kropotkin’s development as a brilliant scientist as he explored almost impassable terrain while also giving us a clear picture of his early political and philosophical thinking at a crucial moment in Russian history.
[more]
Decentralizing Power
Paul Goodman's Social Criticism
Taylor Stoehr
Black Rose Books, 1994
In this new collection of his most acute and durable political writing, readers will recognize the spirit of indignation and hope Goodman first roused in the 1960s with Growing Up Absurd. "Stoehr tells his [Goodman's] story well.This is the genuine kind of decentralism."--The Nation
[more]
Direct Deliberative Democracy
How Citizens Can Rule
Jack Crittenden and Debra J. Campbell
Black Rose Books, 2018
As American politics becomes ever more dominated by powerful vested interests, positive change seems permanently stymied. Left out in the cold by the political process, citizens are frustrated and despairing. How can we take back our democracy from the grip of oligarchy and bring power to the people?
 
In Direct Deliberative Democracy, Jack Crittenden and Debra Campbell offer up a better way for government to reflect citizens’ interests. It begins with a startlingly basic question: “Why don’t we the people govern?” In this provocative book, the authors mount a powerful case that the time has come for more direct democracy in the United States, showing that the circumstances that made the Constitutional framers’ arguments so convincing more than two hundred years ago have changed dramatically—and that our democracy needs to change with them. With money, lobbyists, and corporations now dominating local, state, and national elections, the authors argue that now is the time for citizens to take control of their government by deliberating together to make public policies and laws directly. At the heart of their approach is a proposal for a new system of “legislative juries,” in which the jury system would be used as a model for selecting citizens to create ballot initiatives. This would enable citizens to level the playing field, bring little-heard voices into the political arena, and begin the process of transforming our democracy into one that works for, not against, its citizens. 
[more]
Durruti
The People Armed
Abel Paz
Black Rose Books, 1983
This book is the story of legendary Spanish revolutionary, and uncompromising anarchist, Buenaventura Durruti, as well as a history of the Spanish revolution.  
[more]
Ecology Of Everyday Life
Chaia Heller
Black Rose Books, 1999

Ecology Of Freedom
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1990

Eduardo Galeano
Wind is the Breath of Time, the Storyteller’s Voice Travels On
Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy
Black Rose Books, 2019
Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano was an activist, visionary, and storyteller who began his hugely influential career with the publication of Open Veins of Latin America in 1971, which set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. After this success, Galeano’s writing became increasingly lyrical and inspired by the storytelling of South America’s Indigenous peoples, while remaining politically engaged and prophetic.
 
This book picks up where Daniel Fischlin and Martha Nandorfy’s previous book on Galeano left off, focusing on timely and urgent themes in the last four books he wrote in the twenty-first century. Through his distinctive narrative style of short vignettes—tightly packed explosive stories—Galeano explores what it means to live as mortal beings with a finite amount of time on the earth, waxing and waning between despair and hope. As a hunter of stories, Galeano’s yarns place us, as his listeners and agents of history, in a web where past and future come together to create a present full of possibility.
[more]
Emma Goldman
Still Dangerous
C. Brid Nicholson
Black Rose Books, 2009
A symbol of working-class militancy and female revolt, Emma has been described as "the most dangerous woman in America." Emma Goldman's reputation during her lifetime was in part created by her incorrectly assumed connection with the assassination of President Mc Kinley, and by a young ambitious J. Edgar Hoover. After her death in 1940 it has been her biographers who have continued expanding Goldman's reputation, seeing her as "heroic" and "iconic," some have even gone so far as to describe her as a "cult figure."  To achieve a closer look at the many created versions of Goldman, this book uses visual and written sources to identify how Goldman was shown to the American public and to see literally how these images softened and changed over the years. 
[more]
Enlightenment and Ecology
The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century
Edited by Yavor Tarinski
Black Rose Books, 2019
Throughout his life, prophetic American philosopher Murray Bookchin created social ecology as a comprehensive social program for the challenges of our present era. Through tireless teaching, speaking, organizing, and writing, Bookchin presented a humanist vision of ecology based on community, direct democracy, and the better promises of the Enlightenment, showing how we could transform our society into one that is free and egalitarian.
 
Enlightenment and Ecology is an international collection of commemorative essays by scholars and activists who have each incorporated the ideas of social ecology into their own work. This book also examines how the Kurdish freedom movement is using the Bookchin’s utopian ideas. In a time of urgent need for radical change, these essays provide both precious historical lessons and a transformative road map.
 
[more]
Essays on Marx’s Theory Of Value
Isaac Rubin
Black Rose Books, 1973

Ethics
Origins and Development
Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1993
Ethics is the swan song of the great humanitarian scientist and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin. It constitutes, as it were, the crowning work and the resume of all his scientific, philosophical, and sociological views, at which he arrived in the course of his long and unusually rich life.   Starting with the moral principle in nature, to the moral conceptions of primitive peoples, Kropotkin traces the development of moral teachings from Ancient Greece, Christianity and the Middle Ages, through to the 19th century philosophers. In this way, Ethics gives answers to two fundamental problems of morality: its origin and historical development, and its goals and standards.   A realist and a revolutionist, Kropotkin regarded ethics not as an abstract science of human conduct, but as a concrete scientific discipline, whose object it was to inspire people in their practical activities. According to his theory, mutual aid, justice and self-sacrifice are the three elements of morality and these elements lie at the basis of human ethics. He held that ethics should be one and the same for all people – that no matter what class or party one might belong, we were all, first of all, human beings.   In his introduction, George Woodcock, a great humanitarian in his own right, describes the background from out of which Kropotkin was moved to write this unforgettable work. He introduces the reader, not only to the political and social climate, but also to the man and his innermost concerns.  Ethics is the 8th volume of The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin, published by Black Rose Books.
[more]
Evolution And Environment
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1995
Edited with an Introduction by George Woodcock

The final volume of The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin gathers the many unpublished articles and essays written during his life-long and mostly ignored scientific career. His vision foresaw the more inter-relative and co-operative world that has become evident to us today in the 20th century.

Kropotkin the geographer had a social and political concern that transformed his interest in science into a larger ecological concern that outstripped the understanding of his contemporaries. He upheld the instinct of individuals to support one another, and acknowledged environmental influences on mutation and evolution. Whereas arguments at the time based all change on the drive for survival, Kropotkin's insight – now acknowledged by ecologists – insisted on the selective pressure of the environment and the importance of habitat.

Divided into two sections, “Modern Science and Anarchism” and “Thoughts On Evolution”, this volume illustrates the conjunction of science and anarchism in Kropotkin's life. The essays look to a wider of the world as environment together with human influence, rather than the strict Hegelian dialectical determinism of humanistically-influenced early Marxism.

George Woodcock (1912-1995) has published more than 140 titles on history, biography, philosophy, poetry and literary criticism. He has been called “a gentle anarchist in a state of grace”. Here, his introductions and prefaces help the reader appreciate Kropotkin's revolutionary insights and put the articles in their historical context, scientifically and politically.


Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Modern Science and Anarchism Preface by George Woodcock

1. The Origin of Anarchism

II. The Intellectual Movement of the Eighteenth Century

III. The Reaction at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

IV. Comtes Positive Philosophy

V. The Awakening in the Years 1856-1862

VI. Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy

VII. The Function of Law in Society

VIII. Place of Anarchism in Modern Society

IX. The Anarchist Ideal and the Preceding Revolutions

X. Anarchism

XI. A Few Conclusions of Anarchism

XII. The Means of Action

XIII. Conclusion

1995: 262 pages
[more]
Faith In Faithlessness
An Anthology of Atheism
Edited by Dimitrios Roussopoulos
Black Rose Books, 2007
Asks freethinkers to declare their atheism in defiance of the stigmatization of disbelief.

With the rise of religious fundamentalism worldwide and a new 'spiritualism' in North America, expressed disbelief in God or gods has become a taboo once again in the Anglo-American world. In the last few years, however, atheism has witnessed a resurgence exemplified by the best-selling works of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Faith in Faithlessness is intended to contribute to the reassertion of the legitimacy of godlessness as a philosophical and moral stance. It is a unique anthology that presents a comprehensive selection of writings, by some of the world's most celebrated thinkers, past and present, who eloquently address the most significant questions concerning religious belief.

Included are essays by Benedict de Spinoza, Diderot, Paul-Henry Thiry D'Holbach, David Hume, Thomas Paine, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Stuart Mill, George Elliot, W.E.H. Lecky, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charles Bradlaugh, Anatole France, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert G. Ingersoll, Ludwig Feuerbach, Michael Bakunin, Karl Marx, Emma Goldman, H.L. Mencken, Clarence Darrow, Carl Van Doren, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Gore Vidal, Kai Nielsen, Christine Overall, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Michel Onfray, Elizabeth Second Anderson, Tariq Ali, Salman Rushdie, Kurt Vonnegut. Also included are other celebrity atheists and a major resource guide.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

FROM THE EARLY CLASSICS

1. Theologico-Political Treatise - Benedict de Spinoza
2. Thoughts on Religion - Denis Diderot
3. The System of Nature - Paul-Henry Thiry, Baron d'Holbach
4. The Natural History of Religion - David Hume
5. The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine
6. A Refutation of Deism - Percy Bysshe Shelley
7. Immortality - John Stuart Mill
8. Evangelical Teaching - George Eliot
9. The Spirit of Rationalism in Europe - W.E.H. Lecky
10. The Christian Church and Women - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
11. Humanity's Gain from Unbelief - Charles Bradlaugh
12. Miracle - Anatole France
13. Autobiography - Charles Darwin
14. The Antichrist - Friedrich Nietzsche
15. God and the Constitution - Robert G. Ingersoll
16. The Essence of Religion in General - Ludwig Feuerbach
17. God and the State - Michael Bakunin
18. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right - Karl Marx


FROM THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY CLASSICS

19. The Philosophy of Atheism - Emma Goldman
20. On the Scopes Trial - H.L. Mencken
21. The Lord's Day Alliance - Clarence Darrow
22. Why I Am an Unbeliever - Clarence Darrow
23. Is There a God? - Bertrand Russell
24. The Claims of Theology - A.J. Ayer
25. The UNbelievers and the Christians - Albert Camus
26. Science and Religion - Albert Einstein


FROM THE LATER 20th CENTURY and 21st CENTURY

27. Monotheism and Its Discontents - Gore Vidal
28. How Is Atheism to Be Characterized? - Kai Nielsen
29. Atheism - Christine Overall
30. The Atheist Manifesto - Sam Harris
31. Why There Almost Certainly Is No God - Richard Dawkins
32. Religion as an Original Sin - Christopher Hitchens
33. In the Service of the Death Fixation - Michel Onfray
34. Thank Goodness! - Daniel C. Dennett
35. For the Love of Reason - Louise M. Anthony
36. If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted? - Elizabeth Second Anderson
37. An Atheist Childhood - Tariq Ali
A Rapper's Song - Greydon Square
38. Humanism and the Territory of Novelists - Salman Rushdie
39. Why My Dog Is Not a Humanist - Kurt Vonnegut


EPILOGUE: A New Enlightenment: The Second Wave - Dimitrios Roussopoulos

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

RESOURCE GUIDE from the Website of Richard Dawkins

CREDITS AND PERMISSIONS

Celebrity quotes throughout, including from George Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aldous HUxley, Tennessee Williams, Charles Bukowski, Jean-Paul Sartre, Noam Chomsky, Sigmund Freud, Ingmar Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, John Malkovich, Robert Altman, Jodie Foster, Bill Gates, Angelina Jolie, Jack Nicholson, Howard Stern, Isaac Asimov, Woody Allen, Richard Leakey, James Watson, Jean Roddenberry, Gloria Steinem.


DIMITRIOS ROUSSOPOULOS is author and/or editor of some eighteen books.
[more]
Fields, Factories and Workshops
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1995
Introduction by George Woodcock

It would not be an exaggeration to describe this book as the central work of Kropotkin’s writing career. In one way or another, it occupied more than twenty years of his life. It is a work of argument and suggestion rather than dogmatic statement, and the very tentativeness of this great book make its perceptions all the more relevant.

With at one time Kropotkin’s view of our future might have been regarded as a Utopian dream, today, as a result of the growing realization that the world’s resources of energy and raw materials are finite, that food is our most precious commodity and that people’s working lives are futile and stultifying, the lessons of this book, for both the rich world and the poor, are topical and hopeful.

In addition to a general introduction to the most significant aspects of Kropotkin’s life and thought, George Woodcock has prepared a comprehensive afterword to each essay, allowing the reader to fully see Kropotkin’s ideas in the context of the world a century later.

Is the 9th volume of the The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin.

Table of contents

Editor’s Introduction

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

Chapter 1

The Decentralization of Industries

Editor’s Afterword to Chapter 1

Chapter 2

The Possibilities of Agriculture

Editor’s Afterword to Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Small Industries and Industrial Villages

Editor’s Afterword to Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Brain Work and Manual Work

Editor’s Afterword to Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Conclusion

Editor’s Epilogue


1994: 255 pages, index
[more]
Filtering The News
Jeffery Klaehn
Black Rose Books, 2005

The Fire That Time
Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation
Edited by Nalini Mohabir and Ronald Cummings
Black Rose Books, 2021
In 1969, in one of the most significant black student protests in North American history, Caribbean students called out discriminatory pedagogical practices at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), before occupying the computer center for two weeks. Upon the breakdown of negotiations, the police launched a violent crackdown as a fire mysteriously broke out inside the center and racist chants were hurled by spectators on the street. It was a heavily mediatized flashpoint in the Canadian civil rights movement and the international Black Power struggle that would send shockwaves as far as the Caribbean. Half a century later, we continue to grapple with the legacies of this watershed moment in light of current resistance movements such as Black Lives Matter, calls for reparations, or Rhodes Must Fall. How is the Sir George Williams “affair” remembered, forgotten, or contested? How is blackness included or occluded in decolonizing dialogues?
 
The Fire That Time addresses those questions while it commemorates and reflects upon the transnational resonances of Black protest and radical student movements. Through several thoughtful essays, scholars examine the unfinished business of decolonization and its relationship to questions of pedagogy, institutional life and culture, and ongoing discussions about race and racism.
 
[more]
The Forgotten Revolution
The 1919 Hungarian Republic of Councils
Edited by András B. Göllner
Black Rose Books, 2020
After the ravages of World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Budapest was engulfed by revolution and marauding foreign armies in 1919. Factory workers, disillusioned ex-soldiers, landless peasants, artists, and intellectuals began forming grassroots councils to get the country back on its feet. This groundswell produced a unique cross-class alliance in pursuit of social justice, constitutionalism, and sustainable economic development, which quickly led to the formation of the Hungarian Republic of Councils. After only four months, however, this radically new experiment in self-government ended in tragedy and virtually all of the Republic’s leadership were executed. Over time, the revolution has not only been smeared by the Hungarian right wing but also misunderstood and largely forgotten by the rest of the world.

This volume will set the historical record straight on the heroic but tragic events of 1919, paying tribute to the people who gave their lives to a tenacious and courageous idea. These essays bring together internationally respected scholars from Europe and North America, including Péter Csunderlik, Raquel Varela, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Magda Aranyossi, Lajos Csoma, Susan Zimmermann, Christopher Adam, András B. Göllner, Marie-Josée Lavallée, and Dimitrios Roussopoulos.
[more]
Free Public Transit
And Why We Don't Pay to Ride Elevators
Edited by Jason Prince and Judith Delheim
Black Rose Books, 2018
Just like we don't pay to use elevators, this book argues that we shouldn't pay to ride public transit. In an age of increasing inequalities and ecological crisis, movements advocating free public transit push us to rethink the status quo and consider urban transit as a fundamental human right. Editors Jason Prince and Judith Dellheim have collected a panorama of case studies from around the world: the United States, Canada, Estonia, Greece, France, Italy, Sweden, Poland, China, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and more. These movements are spread across the world, and they aim to achieve two main outcomes—ecological good and fair wealth distribution. Free public transit—coupled with increased capacity and improving service of public transit—might well be the only viable strategy to eliminating car usage and achieving greenhouse gas targets in industrialized cities within a reasonable timeframe. Movements for free mass transit also aim to see public transit treated as a public good, like water and garbage service, that should be paid for out of general tax revenues or a fairer regional tax strategy. This book covers the rapidly changing transport options in cities today, including bike and car share options, Uber and Lyft, and the imminent arrival of driver-less vehicles. The first English-language book ever written on the subject, Free Public Transit is a ground breaking book for those concerned about the future of our cities and an essential resource for those who make, or try to change, urban planning and transport policies.
 
[more]
French Revolution
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1989
With the international celebrations of the French Revolution as background, the publication of Peter Kropotkin's classic with an introduction by George Woodcock represents the fulfilment of an important documentary need.  The turbulent upheaval that swept in the first mighty revolution in the West, and which had such far ranging consequences, has subsequently been described by a thousand differing pens. From the King's summoning of the Estates General in 1789 to the establishment of the Directory in 1793, the revolution has had many interpretations. But Kropotkin is among the very few who analyses this drama not only as a complex interplay of its leading personalities or a chain of political decisions made from above; rather, he penetrates this surface confusion to describe a great reordering of the economic bases of the ancien régime by the mass of urban workers and the peasantry. He saw the redistribution of land impeded at every step by an aggrandising middle class and by the forces of the counter-revolution inside and outside France.  Kropotkin, as a true historian, was not concerned with merely the period he discussed. He saw it as a climax in a long past and future development. The result is a very skillful and absorbing book, with great momentum, an active and readable style, and a capable use of a mass of details regarding the most obscure but no less important aspects of the French Revolution.  First published in 1909 and long out of print, The Great French Revolution is the finest historical writing from the fluent pen of Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). The introduction by George Woodcock, the celebrated Canadian author, throws a modern light on the significance and scope of Kropotkin's contribution.
[more]
Friendly Fascism
Bertram Gross
Black Rose Books, 1990
The 8th November 2016 marked a startling new era in American political life. After the creeping ascent of Right wing authoritarian parties in the UK and Europe Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election brought an alarming form of “alt-right” neo-conservativism into the American political mainstream. Many aspects of this descent into the darkness of fascism was predicted by Bertram Gross in Friendly Fascism, a provocative and original critique of a subtle yet growing fascism in American political life. Gross shows that the chronic problems faced by the U.S. in the late twentieth century required increasing collusion between big business and big government to manage society in the interests of the privileged and powerful. The resulting “friendly fascism”, Gross suggests, lacks the dictatorships, public spectacles and overt brutality of 20th century fascism, but has at its root the same denial of individual freedoms and democratic rights. No one who cares about the future of democracy can afford to ignore the frightening realities of Friendly Fascism.
[more]
From the Ground Up
Essays on Grassroots Democracy
Edited by C. George Benello
Black Rose Books, 2019
Should today's activists aim for more than reformist changes in the policies and personnel of giant corporations and the government? In this collection of classic essays, C. George Benello persuasively argues that modern so­cial movements need to rise to the challenge of spearheading a radical re­organization of society based on the principles of decentralization, community control, and participatory democracy.
 
Integrating some of the best of New Left thought and practice with more recent populist and Green perspectives, Benello's essays and the commentaries of Harry Boyte, Steve Chase, Walda Katz-Fishman, Jane Mansbridge, Chuck Turner, and other major activists from the 1960’s offer important insights for today's new generation of practical utopians. Originally published in 1993, this revised and updated edition also includes “The New Movement and its Theory of Organization,” a discussion by David Wieck, Todd Gitlin, George Woodcock, J. F. Conway, and Joan Renold.
 
[more]
Fugitive Writings
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1993
Introduction by George Woodcock

These essays, which either have not been previously published or have been out of print, embrace Kropotkin's philosophy at a time when he first gave it expression.

This collection contains selected essays by Peter Kropotkin who was, unquestionably, the most widely read and respected theorist of anarchism. It is intended to make some of his most representative writings more accessible. The material consists of essays which either have not been previously published or have been out of print since their original publication.

While the entire scope of Kropotkin's political thinking cannot possibly be projected in a single volume, it is hoped that many of his most fundamental conceptions have been exemplified here, for these essays embrace Kropotkin's philosophy at a time when he was struggling to first give them expression.

In this context, Kropotkin's very first political essay, Must We Occupy Ourselves With An Examination of the Ideal of a Future System, written in 1873, which foreshadows most of his later writings, is of particular value.

Apart from a general introduction to the most significant aspects of Kropotkin's life and thought, George Woodcock has prepared a preface to each essay allowing the reader to enter into the spirit of the time.


Table of Contents

Preface

Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the Ideal Future System?

Preface

Anarchist Communism: Its Basics and Principles

Preface

Anarchist Morality

Preface

The State: Its Historic Role


1993: 240 pages
[more]
Germany East
Dissent and Opposition
Bruce Allen
Black Rose Books, 1991

Green Politics, Green Economics
Athena Palaeologu
Black Rose Books, 2017
Given the world-wide ecological crisis, to what extent do the current economic systems of production and consumption need to change? To make substantial changes to the dominant economic system as the author proposes, area new politics required? What are the relations between economic and political changes? M. Athena Palaeologu’s lucid and engaging analysis offers concrete proposals for moving beyond our current social and environmental impasse.  In market-driven economies around the world ecological crises are creating major problems of supply and distribution. The inability of governments to manage these environmental problems both domestically and internationally has led to widespread contradictions between public rhetoric and political practice. A growing number of contemporary publications respond to these crises by advocating a successful marriage of the corporate marketplace with the goals of environmentalism, in a marketing landscape where large and small corporations are tripping over each other to present their “green”credentials. M. Athena Palaeologu’s timely work Green Politics,Green Economics examines these apologetic responses to broach an uncomfortable but fundamental question–is long-term and sustainable development really possible under market capitalism?  Palaeologu develops two alternative approaches to these environmental challenges: (i) a“green politics”that places major importance on achieving ecological goals through grassroots participatory citizen involvement, drawing heavily on values shared with feminist and social movements, and; (ii) a“green economics”that address the dynamic and spatial interdependence between human economies and the natural ecosystems which sustain them. The focus of both of these approaches is the“scale”conundrum: how are we to implement a green economics capable of realising development within the ecological constraints of our planet’s biosphere?
[more]
House of Mirrors
Justin Trudeau's Foreign Policy
Yves Engler
Black Rose Books, 2021
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau presents himself as progressive on foreign affairs. According to Trudeau, he and his Liberals have brought Canada back after the disastrous Conservative government under Stephen Harper. In House of Mirrors, Yves Engler asks probing questions and demonstrates that the opposite is true: Trudeau, he argues, largely continued Harper’s foreign policy.
 
House of Mirrors outlines how Trudeau’s government has expanded the military while ignoring international efforts to restrict nuclear weapons proliferation. The Liberals, Engler shows, have launched an unprecedented effort to overthrow Venezuela’s government while siding with an assortment of reactionary governments. Flouting their climate commitments, the Trudeau government also failed to follow through on its promise to rein in Canada’s controversial mining sector.
 
With heavily documented analysis, House of Mirrors gives insight into the Liberals’ rhetorical skills that whitewash their pro-corporate and conservative policies with progressive slogans.
[more]
How The First World War Began
Edward e. Mccullough
Black Rose Books, 1998

Imagining the Middle East
Thierry Hentsch
Black Rose Books, 1992
Examines how Western perceptions of the Middle East were formed and how we have used them as a rationalization for setting policies and determining actions. 
[more]
Insatiable Hunger
Colonial Encounters in Context
Joseph Graham
Black Rose Books, 2021
An exploration of the worldviews that underpinned settler colonialism. 

The sixteenth-century European wars of religion set the stage for mass migration to the New World. Of course, there was nothing new about the New World to Indigenous peoples who had lived there for millennia. Insatiable Hunger compares European historical accounts and Indigenous stories of contact to illustrate the wide cultural chasm that separated the two civilizations. Joseph Graham tells a story of religiously obsessed Europeans pouring onto the continent and consuming everything in their path and the attempts Indigenous peoples made to reason with the hungry newcomers. Tracing events from Jacques Cartier’s first visits in the sixteenth century to the War of 1812, Insatiable Hunger attempts to understand the root causes of the mutual incomprehension baked into these two civilizations’ worldviews. As descendants of European settlers in Canada and the United States confront the legacy of colonialism and genocide of Indigenous peoples, Insatiable Hunger will be an important primer on the worldviews at the root of this violent political project.
[more]
Karl Polanyi In Dialogue
Michael Brie
Black Rose Books, 2017

The contemporary Left fights its political battles on various fronts: protesting the crippling structural inequalities that sustain neoliberal economic policy; developing sustainable, community-based alternatives to the consumerism and short-termism that exacerbate the environmental crisis; and advocating for the cultural recognition, emancipation and celebration of the diversity and pluralism of human identity. But despite this versatility the Left appears to be in worldwide retreat whilst an aggressive new ‘Alt-Right’ is taking to the internet and the streets, regurgitating a regressive and patriarchal vision of society that has already won startling political victories in the US and Europe.

Amidst the vertiginous tension of such a crisis, Michael Brie argues for an urgent theoretical and practical reorganisation of the Left. Developing the work of philosopher and social theorist Karl Polanyi, Brie advocates an alliance of socialist liberals and libertarian ‘commonists’ that unites contemporary campaigns for recognition, difference and human dignity with more traditional struggles for social welfare and economic democracy. Starting with Nancy Fraser’s critical reappraisal of Polanyi in her article “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi” (included), Brie powerfully reinterprets Polanyi’s thought for present times, developing concrete proposals for a Polanyian political response to neoliberalism, an ascendent authoritarian right and the ongoing threat of global ecological disaster. Also included are two articles by Polanyi translated into English for the first time and Kari Polanyi-Levitt’s lecture at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation “From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialisation”.

[more]
Karl Polanyi's Vision of a Socialist Transformation
Edited by Michael Brie and Claus Thomasberger
Black Rose Books, 2018
The political and economic turmoil that followed our most recent financial crisis has sparked a huge resurgence of interest in the work of Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), famous anthropologist, economist, and social philosopher. Polanyi’s 1944 masterpiece, The Great Transformation, spoke of dangerous increasing dominance of the market and the resulting counter-movements, a prediction that has been borne out by current international grassroots resistance to austerity, alienation, and environmental upheaval of our world.
 
In Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist Transformation, German social and economic philosophers Michael Brie and Claus Thomasberger bring together central figures in in the field—including Gareth Dale, Nancy Fraser, and Kari Polanyi Levitt—to provide an essential anthology on the contemporary importance of Polanyi’s thought. This book is centered around Polanyi's ideas on freedom and community in a complex socialist society based on a completely transformed economy. It also includes five 1920s essays by Polanyi recently discovered in the Montreal Polanyi archive and translated into English for the first time, including his lecture “On Freedom”, which is central to his unique understanding of socialism.  
[more]
Kropotkin Now!
Life, Freedom & Ethics
Edited by Christopher Coquard
Black Rose Books, 2021
Essays on the revolutionary Russian anarchist’s ideas about mutual aid, sex, and participatory democracy for the twenty-first century. 

Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) was one of the great thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a  Russian anarchist, philosopher, economist, historian, geographer, and scientist, Kropotkin had a range of contributions that were as divergent as they were holistic. Kropotkin’s critical thought on issues such as mutual aid and anarchism have become tenets of multiple twenty-first-century social movements. As the foundations of neoliberalism shake and neofascist movements spawn around the world, the practice of mutual aid, the theories of anarchism and participatory democracy, and critique of social Darwinism have seldom been as important as they are today.  Many activists and scholars are using Kropotkin’s ideas to challenge these authoritarian threats and to work toward an egalitarian future. Kropotkin Now! is the culmination of an international effort to investigate Kropotkin’s ideas and to imagine new alternatives on the centenary of his death. Contributors engage Kropotkin’s work in diverse contexts, including evolution and mutual aid, cyborgs and feminist technoscience, Kropotkin’s treatment of “the sex question,” urbanization, building dual power, and more.
[more]
Left, Right
Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada
Yves Engler
Black Rose Books, 2018
The left is supposed to be opposed to colonialism and at least skeptical of nationalism. However, Left, Right shows that, for decades now, this hasn’t been the case in Canada. Yves Engler marshals damning detail on the long, surprising history of support from the New Democratic Party and labor unions for such policies and international interventions as the coup in Haiti, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Korean War, and much more. The rhetoric of the mainstream left, he shows, has also tended to concede major points to the dominant war-mongering ideology, with prominent commentators such as Linda McQuaig and Stephen Lewis echoing the terminology of right-wing politicians and thinkers. More than simply diagnosing a problem, however, Left, Right offers a path forward, laying out ways to get us working for an ecologically sound, peace-promoting, and non-exploitative foreign policy.
 
[more]
Limits Of The City
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1985
"City air makes people free." With this adage Murray Bookchin begins a remarkable essay on the evolution of urbanism. With a wealth of learning and a depth of passion, Bookchin convincingly argues that there was once a human and progressive tradition of urban life, and that this heritage has reached its "ultimate negation in the modern metropolis". 
[more]
Louise Michel
Edith Thomas
Black Rose Books, 1984

Manufacturing Consent
Noam Chomsky and the Media: The Companion Book to the Award-Winning Film
Mark Achbar
Black Rose Books, 1994

Memoirs Of A Revolutionist
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1987
Introduction by George Woodcock

This precious work, which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, was published in book form in 1899. Having delighted readers as varied as Leo Tolstoy and Lewis Mumford, Memoirs continues to be a classic in this literary genre.

Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was born into the highest rank of the Russian aristocracy. This fascinating account of his dramatic conversion from prince to anarchist is more than an autobiography; it is an extraordinary portrait of the old Russia, both before and after the liberation of the serfs.

Kropotkin was a remarkable writer in the Russian tradition, and this work stands as a non-fictional counterpart of the novels in which Turgenev and other great Russian writers portray the development of social conscience among the youth in autocratic society.

Having renounced his title, Kropotkin pursued his work as a scientist and won international acclaim as a geographer as well as a radical. Memoirs is also a study of the early anarchist movement in Western Europe, in which Kropotkin played a part after his escape from a Russian prison – thereby earning a second imprisonment, this time in France.

George Woodcock, one of Canada’s most distinguished men of letters has written biographies of such monumental figures as Gandhi, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.


Table of Contents

AN INTRODUCTION by George Woodcock

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I. CHILDHOOD

II. THE CORPS OF PAGES

III. SIBERIA

IV. ST. PETERSBURG – FIRST JOURNEY TO WESTERN EUROPE

V. THE FORTRESS – THE ESCAPE

VI. WESTERN EUROPE


1989: 504 pages
[more]
Mind Abuse
Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy
Rose A. Dyson
Black Rose Books, 2020
Although rogue elements on the internet have spawned concerns about foreign interference in elections, invasion of privacy, and the impact of hate speech, most people are still in denial about the harmful effects of media violence as entertainment. This new edition of Mind Abuse covers developments in the last twenty years, showing how the problem has grown with each new technological innovation and how relentless marketing victimizes countless young people around the world while the entertainment industry rakes in billions. Rose A. Dyson offers a wake-up call to parents, teachers, health professionals, and policy makers who deal with the aftermath of first-person shooter video gaming and social media abuses, such as cyberbullying, that encourage errant behavior from an early age. She shows that recent trends toward increased violence in popular culture are symptomatic of deeper social, economic, and ecological problems that require an urgent shift away from the status quo toward a more sustainable model for peaceful co-existence. 
 
For over 30 years, Dyson has contributed to the debate over media violence. Here, she urges us to resist the corporate giants of the entertainment industries and reclaim the right to shape our own value systems and dreams. Blind consumption of media violence as entertainment, she argues, is not inconsistent with vital policies for a greener, healthier future.
 
[more]
Murray Bookchin Reader
Janet Biehl
Black Rose Books, 1999
This collection provides an overview of the thought of the foremost social theorist and political philosopher of the libertarian left today. Best known for introducing ecology as a concept relevant to radical political thought in the early 1960s, Murray Bookchin was the first to propose, in the innovative and coherent body of ideas that he has called "social ecology", that a liberatory society would also have to be an ecological one. His writings span five decades and encompass subject matter of remarkable breadth. Bookchin's writings on revolutionary philosophy, politics and history are far less known than the specific controversies that have surrounded him, but deserve far greater attention. Despite Bookchin's critical engagement with both Marxism and anarchism, his political philosophy, known as libertarian municipalism, draws on the best of both for the emancipatory tools to build a democratic, libertarian alternative. His nature philosophy is an organic outlook of generation, development, and evolution that grounds human beings in natural evolution yet, contrary to today's fashionable anti-humanism, places them firmly at its summit. Bookchin's anthropological writings trace the rise of hierarchy and domination out of egalitarian societies, while his historical writings cover important chapters in the European revolutionary tradition. Consistent throughout Bookchin's work is a search for ways to replace today's capitalist society--which disenchants most of humanity for the benefit of the few and is poisoning the natural world--with a more rational and humane alternative. The selections in this reader constitute a sampling from the writings of one of the most pivotal thinkers of our era.
[more]
Mutual Aid
A Factor of Evolution
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1986
In Mutual Aid, which was first published in 1903, the renowned geographer applies his explorations of Eastern Asia and his study of wild-animal behaviour to a critical examination of the theory of evolution. His arguments anticipate in a remarkable way the contention of contemporary ecologists that the world of nature is one of interdependence rather than strife.   Born in 1942 into an ancient military family of Russian princes, Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin was selected as a child for the elite Corps of Pages by Czar Nicholas I himself. Shortly before his death in 1921, Kropotkin had moved so far from his aristocratic beginnings and had attained such stature as a libertarian leader that he could with with impunity to Lenin, “Vladimir Ilyich, your actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.”   Kropotkin provides a potent argument for anarchism by showing that people tend to cooperate spontaneously and that the state destroys this natural inclination towards mutual aid by strangling initiative with the dead hand of regulation.   With the exception of his memoirs, this is Kropotkin's best-known work, and it is widely regarded as his masterpiece. It forms the cornerstone of his philosophy, and constitutes the most successful attempt by any writer to put anarchism on a scientific foundation. Mutual Aid is still the best refutation of the Darwinian thesis of survival of the fittest.
[more]
Nationalism And Culture
Rudolf Rocker
Black Rose Books, 1997
Originally published in 1937, Rudolf Rocker’s classic Nationalism and Culture is a detailed study of the intellectual development and cultural history of European nationalism. Tracing the evolution of religious and political systems and their relation to the authoritarian state, Rocker analyses concepts of ‘Nation’ as alleged communities of race, culture, language,and common interest.
[more]
On the Barricades of Berlin
An Account of the 1848 Revolution
August Brass
Black Rose Books, 2019
The 1848 wave of worker rebellions that swept across Europe struck the German states with the March Revolution.  The writer August Brass led the successful defense of the barricades in Berlin's Alexanderplatz public square. Published in English for the first time, On the Barricades of Berlin provides a riveting firsthand account of this uprising.
 
Brass’ testimony begins with the tumultuous events leading up to the revolution: the peaceful democratic agitation; the demands that were brought to the king; and the key actors involved on all sides of the still peaceful, yet tense, struggle. It then follows the events that led to the outbreak of resistance to the forces of order and sheds light on the aftermath of the fighting once the exhausted Prussian army withdrew from the city.
 
[more]
The Organic Revolutionary
A Memoir from the Movement for Real Food, Planetary Healing, and Human Liberation
Grace Gershuny
Black Rose Books, 2019
An influential founding member of the American organic agriculture movement and a long-time organic farmer, Grace Gershuny gives us one of the most comprehensive and deeply personal accounts of adventures in that movement ever written. A principal author of the USDA's first proposed National Organic rule, Gershuny left the National Organic Program staff just before the final rule was published. The complicated story of that movement for nationwide organic regulations, which consumed Gershuny’s life for five years, is interwoven here with her own personal timeline before, during, and after the arduous federal process.
 
This memoir explores how the organic revolution became rooted well before the US federal government cared to notice. Gershuny asks important ongoing questions about the organic movement that still aren’t receiving enough attention, such as whether organic standards should be consumer or farmer-driven and if organic agriculture architecture will be able to maintain its principles as it becomes mainstream. Entertaining yet urgent, Organic Revolutionary thoughtfully details the personal, political, and practical struggles that ensued in the heroic effort to push the organic movement beyond farmers' markets and into supermarkets.
 
[more]
Organicity
Entropy or Evolution
David Dobereiner
Black Rose Books, 2019
Nature is endlessly reinventing itself in a constant flux of movement and diversity. Yet the advancement of modern civilization has engendered extreme inequality, social division, and an imbalance between society and nature. Our technological proficiency has given our species the illusion of omnipotence; in our efforts to build robots more like us, we have not noticed how robotic we ourselves have become. To deal with this profound crisis, we must understand this problem at its roots. Could the origins of social domination and ecological exploitation be related? Is it possible for us to transform these dynamics and design society in a way that is cognizant of, and harmonious with, the Earth?
 
In this visionary book, David Dobereiner lucidly delves into the present urban and ecological impasse and examines the prospects for our future. Laced with insights into social and political ecology and written with a lifetime’s experience of innovating in ecological design, Organicity shows that there is still hope to build a more humane, egalitarian, and sustainable system, but it requires a fundamental shift in the way we do civilization. At the crossroads of creation and destruction, will evolution or entropy triumph?
 
[more]
Oscar Wilde
The Double Image
George Woodcock
Black Rose Books, 1989
Oscar Wilde was seemingly drawn towards many paradoxes: paganism and Christianity; to be a playboy or a prophet; or to be an aesthetic clown or the creative critic. George Woodcock takes us through this double image of the celebrated personality and writer and attempts to resolve the contradictions. Wilde was influenced by Walter Pater and the Epicureans, by John Ruskin’s theories on Art and also by his severe criticisms of the Industrial Revolution, and by the writings of Chuang Tzu, the ancient Chinese Taoist. He was also drawn to Jesus trying bravely to fit him into his growing asymmetrical system. The Wilde/Queensborough ‘scandal’ trial is not much discussed here, but the resultant works are: De Profundis, the letter to Lord Douglas, erstwhile lover and nemesis; The Ballad of Reading Gaol, that heartrending dry of pain from the universal prison. The paradox: this is the same man who wrote frothy plays like The Importance of Being Earnest and the manifesto, The Souls of Man Under Socialism, which is included in this book, a work which socialists do not take seriously because they have difficulty envisioning a non-authoritarian society. Oscar Wilde could. In reality, he expressed an anarchist, individualist vision, straight, thus coming close to unraveling his own, and our paradox.
[more]
The Perils of Invention
Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition
Edited by Roger Berkowitz
Black Rose Books, 2021
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) is the leading thinker of politics and the humanities in the modern era and continues to draw widespread attention. No other scholar so enrages and engages citizens and scholars from all political persuasions, all the while insisting on human dignity, providing a clear voice against totalitarianism, and defending freedom with extraordinary intelligence and courage. An activist and thinker whose work resists simple categorization, Arendt writes with a stunning lucidity that resonates with intellectuals and the reading public alike. Her writing continues to delight and inspire, even as she asks us to confront the most haunting questions of our time.

The Perils of Invention is based on three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences: "Human Being in an Inhuman Age," "Lying and Politics," and "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts." Contributions written for these conferences are placed alongside many new essays that reflect on the ideas they raised. The result is a freshly invigorated investigation into these critical and timely themes. The authors have diverse backgrounds—Arendt scholars, public intellectuals, novelists, journalists, and business people—and include Uday Mehta, Marrianne Constable, Nicholson Baker, George Kateb, Marianne Constable, Linda M.G. Zerilli, Peg Birmingham, Davide Panagia, and many others.
[more]
Peter Kropotkin
From Prince to Rebel
George Woodcock
Black Rose Books, 1990
Anarchism - the concept of a society without authority, of a civil order without any form of constitution or government - has fascinated people almost as long as we have possessed the power of speculative thought. In the general history of anarchism, the name of Peter Kropotkin dominates.

Born in 1842 into an ancient military family of Russian princes, Kropotkin was selected as a child for the elite Corps of Pages by Tsar Nicholas I himself. Shortly before his death in 1921, he had moved so far from his aristocratic beginnings and attained such stature as a libertarian leader that he could write with impunity to Lenin, “Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.”

Woodcock and Avakumovic’s biography, From Prince to Rebel, details the life that flowed between these two points in time. It surveys and analyses the most significant aspects of Kropotkin’s life and thought: his formative years in Russia, 1842-1876, and the origins of his anarchist thinking (military service in eastern Siberia, the influence of the works of Proudhon and Bakunin, his role in the Chaikovsky Circle); his years as an émigré in western Europe, 1876-1917, and the ripening of his political though (editor of Le Révolté, his views on Marxist socialism); and his last years in the Soviet Union, 1917-1921, the revolution and civil war, and his meeting and correspondence with Lenin.

Among the recent works of George Woodcock, a well-known Canadian author, are biographies of William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Black Rose Books). Ivan Avakumovic is Professor of History at the University of British Colombia and the author of History of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.


Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Youth

2. The Explorer

3. The Convert

4. The Agitator

5. “The White Jesus”

6. The Traveller

7. The Writer

8. The Exile

9. The Neglected Sage

10. The Prophet

Bibliography

Supplement for 1971 Edition

Supplement to the 1990 Edition

Index


1990: 490 pages, index, illustrated
[more]
Philosophy Of Social Ecology
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1995
A useful corrective to simplistic thinking about the human predicament.--Canadian Book Review Annual

"Bookchin expands upon the concept of natural evolution and delivers it from the trap of mechanistic thinking."--Imprint
[more]
Pioneers Of Ecological Humanism
Brian Morris
Black Rose Books, 2017
“Brian Morris blazed a lot of trails. He is a scholar of genuine daring and great humanity, and his work deserves to be read and debated for a very long time to come." —David Graeber, author ofDebt: The First 5,000 Years In our world of ecological catastrophe and social crisis, some roundly condemn modern civilisation as the source of our Promethean predicament. What can follow is a rejection of humanism, science and the City and a turn to either nostalgic primitivism or esoteric spirituality. But do we really need to flee the city for the woods in order to build a free society? In this triple intellectual biography, Brian Morris lucidly discusses three intellectual giants who made an enormous, though often overlooked, contribution to modern ecology: Lewis Mumford, René Dubos, and Murray Bookchin. Morris argues that they have forged a third way beyond both industrialism and anti-modernism: ecological humanism (also known as social ecology), a tradition that embraces both ecological realities and the ethical and cultural wealth of humanism. In examining their thought, Professor Morris paves the way for fresh debate on ecology, charting an optimistic vision for the profound reharmonisation of nature and culture as well as the ecological, egalitarian and democratic transformation of our cities and society. Essential reading for anyone with an interest or active role in ecology or philosophy and their associated disciplines, Pioneers of Ecological Humanism is written in a clear and refreshingly direct style that will appeal to academics, activists, and armchair ecologists alike. Leaving school at the age of fifteen, Brian Morris had a varied career: foundry worker, seaman, and tea-planter in Malawi, before becoming a university teacher. Now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, he is the author of numerous articles and books on ethnobotany, religion and symbolism, hunter-gatherer societies and concepts of the individual. His books include Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision (2006), Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction (2006), Insects and Human Life (2004) and Kropotkin: The Politics of Community (2004). Black Rose Books is also the publisher of his Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom (1993) and the forthcoming Anarchist Miscellany. Pioneers of Ecological Humanism is essential reading for anyone concerned with these issues. Conversant with the history of ideas, Morris places Bookchin especially in a context that has eluded other authors who have treated his work. His writing style is lucid and accessible.Highly recommended. – Janet Biehl, author, partner of Murray Bookchin 275 pages, Bibliography and Index Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55164-607-7 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-55164-609-1 eBook ISBN: 978-1-55164-611-4 Table of Contents Preface Ecological Humanism: An Introduction Part 1: Lewis Mumford and Organic Humanism 1. The Radical Scholar 2. Lewis Mumford: The Formative Years 3. Technics and Civilisation 4. The Culture of Cities 5. Western Culture and its Transformation: The Rise of Mechanistic Philosophy 6. The Insurgence of Romanticism and Utilitarian Philosophy 7. Mumford's Organic Philosohpy 8. The Renewal of Life Part 2 René Duos and Ecological Humanism 9. René Dubos and the Celebration of Life 10. The Living World and Human Nature 11. Sociocultural Evolution and the Human Personality 12. The Ecology of Health and Disease 13. The Theology of the Earth 14. Humanized Landscapes 15. The Wooing of the Earth 16. Science and Holism Part 3 The Social Ecology of Murray Bookchin 17. Bookchin's Life and Work 18. The Environmental Crisis and Eco-Anarchism 19. Toward an Ecological Society 20. The Concept of Ecological Society 21. The Deep Ecology Movement 22. Deep Ecology, Biocentrism and Misanthropy 23. Neo-Malthusianism and the Politics of Deep Ecology 24. The Philosophy of Social Ecology 25. In Defence of the Enlightenment Bibliography Index
[more]
Political Ecology
System Change Not Climate Change
Dimitri Roussopoulos
Black Rose Books, 2018
“System change not climate change!” This cry reverberated throughout the streets of Paris during 2015’s heated COP21 climate negotiations. It was as much a demand as it was an indictment of the failure of existing political institutions to respond adequately to our world’s ecological crisis. In an era of slow motion apocalypse, with 3,500 international environmental agreements to date, where did everything go wrong?
 
In this new and greatly expanded edition of his 1991 classic Political Ecology, Dimitri Roussopoulos delves into the history of environmentalism to explain the failure of the state management of the ecological crisis. He explores civil society’s various past responses and the prospects for channeling environmentalist aspirations into political alternatives, emphasizing the ideas of social ecology and the central role of democratic neighborhoods and cities in developing alternatives. Ecologists, Roussopoulos argues, aim further than simply protecting the environment—they call for new communities, new lifestyles, and a new way of doing politics.
 
This US edition also includes a new preface analyzing the implications of Trump’s presidency for climate politics and an extensive new conclusion analyzing the Paris Accord. Revised, expanded, and updated, Political Ecology is a classic that provides an essential, timely history of the environmental movement now when we need it most. 
 
[more]
The Politics Of Individualism
Liberalism, Liberal Feminism and Anarchism
L Susan Brown
Black Rose Books, 2002
In The Politics of Individualism L. Susan Brown argues for a new vision of human freedom which incorporates the insights of feminism and liberalism into a form of anarchism based on what she calls 'existential individualism.' The work focuses specifically on the similarities and differences of these political philosophies, by critically examining the liberal feminist writings of John Stuart Mill, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir and Janet Radcliffe Richards, paying special attention to the issues of employment, education, marriage and the family, and governmental politics. These works are, in turn, compared and contrasted to the anarcho-feminism of Emma Goldman. Finally, as feminism as a whole movement is subjected to a rigorous critique, in terms of its overall liberatory potential, what emerges is a compelling look at feminist anarchism, describing 'what ought to be--and what could be.'
[more]
Politics Of Social Ecology
Janet Biehl
Black Rose Books, 1997
The culmination of a lifetime of thinking about how society might best be transformed.
[more]
Prometheus Against the Leviathan
Theories About the State
Costas Despiniadis
Black Rose Books, 2023
An examination of the emergence of the modern state and anarchist critiques of it.
 
The emergence of the modern nation-state created institutions of political and economic power unrivaled in human history. This volume argues that, nonetheless, the existence of the state is not an inevitable “end of history,” provided an informed citizenry remembers that all institutions are fleeting and can change in the face of popular resistance. After all, Costas Despiniadis argues, the state is the exception in human history, a deviation from millennia of stateless societies. Perhaps the most thorough contemporary review of theories of the state and its formation, this book considers the work of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, and Marx before turning to examine anarchist readings of the state by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Striner, Landauer, and Nietzsche, finding that anarchist criticisms of the state are borne out by history and that their theories more closely resemble the anthropological records of communities that were clearly more egalitarian and less violent.
 
[more]
Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion
Sol Littman
Black Rose Books, 2003
Pure Soldiers traces the 14th Waffen-SS Division's fortunes from its formation in April 1943 until its surrender to the British in May 1946, their subsequent stay as prisoners-of-war in Italy, and their eventual transfer as agricultural workers in Britain.  In 1950 they began their immigration to Canada and the United States. Along the way they were recruited by the British as anti-Soviet spies and by the CIA as political assassins. In spelling out the Division's history, the author attempts to shed light on this acrimonious dispute that rages to the present day.
[more]
Rebel Musics
Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble
Black Rose Books, 2003
A fascinating journey into a rich, complex world, where music and politics unite, where rebel musicians are mobilizing for political change and social justice.
[more]
Rebel Musics, Volume 2
Human Rights, Resistant Sounds, and the Politics of Music Making
Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble
Black Rose Books, 2019
When it was first published in 2003, Rebel Musics sought to explore how musical activism resonates as resistance to the dominant culture, and how political action through music increases the potential for people to determine their own fate. If anything, these issues seem to be even more pressing today. Rebel Musics offers a fascinating journey into a rich, complex world where music and politics unite, and where rebel musicians are mobilizing for political change, resistance, and social justice. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble cover a wide range of artists, genres, and topics, including Thomas Mapfumo, Bob Marley, William Parker, Frank Zappa, Edgard Varese, Ice-T, American blues, West African drumming, hip hop, gospel, rock’n’roll cabaret, Paul Robeson, and free jazz. This book shows how rebel music is at the heart of some of the most incisive critiques of global politics. With explosive lyrics and driving rhythms, rebel musicians are helping to mobilize movements for political change and social justice, at home and around the world.
 
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Black Rose Books, this revised and expanded edition of Rebel Musics will include all the original essays, as well as a new contribution by the editors. Rounding out the new edition will be several new pieces from artists and scholars that will continue to spark debate about these vital topics in compelling ways.
 
[more]
Reclaiming Cities
Revolutionary Dimensions of Political Participation
Yavor Tarinski
Black Rose Books, 2023
How cities can better address the concerns of their citizens through federations.
 
Reclaiming Cities is a global history of the city and the citizen that documents experiences with direct democratic governance and explores the theoretical groundwork that underpins such movements. The mutual interests of the state and multinational corporations routinely thwart any meaningful actions on a wide variety of issues of concern to citizens, such as climate change, labor policy, civil rights, and gun control—issues better addressed by citizens concerned for the well-being of their communities. Yavor Tarinski argues that instead of relying on bureaucratic summits and centralized solutions, cities ought to band together in federations, beyond national boundaries, uniting citizens in struggles against ecological catastrophe and other existential crises.
 
[more]
Remaking Society
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1992

The Rise Of Cities
Dimitri Roussopoulos
Black Rose Books, 2017
Featuring essays from Dimitri Roussopoulos, Shawn Katz, Bill Freeman, Patrick J. Smith and Ann Marie Utratel In the early 2000s human society entered a new urban epoch in which the majority of human beings live in cities. The Rise of Cities: Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver and Other Cities offers an intriguing response to this milestone. Taking the 150th anniversary of Canada in 2017 as an opportunity to respond to essential urban questions through the lens of Canada’s three major cities, the contributors present a stimulating analysis of how cities coalesce, develop, and thrive, and how they can be remade to better serve the lifeblood of all cities – their citizens. Also featuring essays on urban activism in Barcelona and Madrid, The Rise of Cities provides a rigorous and accessible introduction to the key questions of 21st century urbanism. 214 Pages; Includes Bibliography Paperback ISBN; 978-1-55164-334-2 Hardback ISBN: 978-1-55164-335-9 eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-55164-615-2 Table of Contents From the Rise of Cities to the Right to the City - By Way of an Introduction -Dimitri Roussopoulos Montréal -Shawn Katz and Dimitri Roussopoulos Toronto -Bill Freeman Vancouver -Patrick J. Smith Other Cities: Social Movements and Barcelona, Madrid -Ann Marie Utratel Biographical Notes on Contributors Bibliography
[more]
Russian And French Prison
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1991
With an introduction by George Woodcock.

Nearly a century has passed since Kropotkin wrote In Russian and French Prisons, yet his criticisms of the penal system have lost none of their relevance. Prisons- far from reforming the offender, or deterring crime- are, in themselves, “schools of crime”. Every year, thousands of prisoners are returned to society without hope, without a trade, or without nay means of subsistence, and statistics show that once a man has been in prison he is likely to return. Moreover, the new offense is likely to be more serious than the first.

Although Kropotkin makes extensive use of the memoirs of former prisoners and the works of contemporary penologists, it is his own experience in prison--he spent five years behind bars, two in Russia, three in France--that gives this book its power. He shows from first hand knowledge the immense human suffering caused by prison life: how it destroys the mind and body, how it degrades and humiliates, how it perverts the prisoner’s character and robs him of his dignity, how it reduces him to the condition of a caged animal, how his whole life is subjected to a deadly mechanical routine, how everything is done to break his spirit and kill his inner strength.

In Russian and French Prisons is the 6th volume of The Collected Works of Peter Kropotkin.


Table of Contents

Introduction to the 1991 edition by George Woodcock

Author’s preface to the Russian edition (1906)

Introduction

I. My first acquaintance with Russian prisons

II. Russian prisons

III. The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul

IV. Outcast Russia

V. The exile in Siberia

VI. The exile of Sakhalin

VII. A foreigner in Russian prisons

VIII. In French prisons

IX. On the moral influence of prisons on prisoners

X. Are prisons necessary?

Appendix A- Trial of the Soldiers accused of having carried Letters from Alexis Ravelin

Appendix B- On the part played by the Exiles in the Colonization of Siberia

Appendix C- Extract from a Report on “Administrative Exile,” read by M. Shakeeff at the Sitting of the St. Petersburg Nobility on February 17, 1881

Appendix D- On Reformatories for Boys in France


1991: 387 pages, index
[more]
Russian Literature
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1990
Introduction by George Woodcock

In this work, Peter Kropotkin is propounding the thesis that, in Russia, literature occupies a inique position because it is the only way of reflecting the real currents of intellectual development and of underground political opinion. The consequence, he feels, has been that the best minds of the country have chosen the poem, the novel, the satire, or literary criticism as the medium for expressing their aspirations, their conceptions of national life, and their ideals.

Concentrating on content rather than on form, on intention rather than achievement, Russian Literature provides a fair and comprehensive introduction to Russian writing up to the end of the nineteenth century. Almost every poet and prose-writer of any significance is discussed – Pushkin, Lermontoff, Gogol, Turgueneff, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky – and every class of literature is included; criticism as well as novels, and political writings as well as poetry.



Table of Contents

Preface

The Pronunciation of Russian Names

An Introduction by George Woodcock

Chapter I: Introduction

Chapter II: Pushkin and Lermontoff

Chapter III: Gogol

Chapter IV: Turgueneff - Tolotsy

Chapter V: Gontcharoff – Dostoyevskiy – Nekrasoff

Chapter VI: The Drama

Chapter VII: The Folk Novelists

Chapter VIII: Political Literature – Satire – Art Criticism – Later Period Novelists

Bibliographical Notes

Appendices



Index

1991: 385 pages, index
[more]
Self-Determination Struggles
In Pursuit of the Democratic Confederalist Ideal
Thomas Jeffrey Miley
Black Rose Books, 2023
A thorough contemporary discussion of the meaning and theory of self-determination.
 
Self-determination is a concept as indispensable as it is contentious. This volume examines the theory and meaning of self-determination today through an exploration of the work of figures such as Rosa Luxembourg, Frantz Fanon, and Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdish Freedom Movement. Leaving no stone unturned, Self-Determination Struggles not only includes radical political movements and thinkers but makes them the core of its investigations, presenting them in granular, revealing detail rare to find elsewhere.
[more]
Social Ecology and the Right to the City
Towards Ecological and Democratic Cities
Edited by Federico Venturini, Emet Degirmenci, and Inés Morales
Black Rose Books, 2019
Cities today are increasingly at the forefront of the environmental and social crisis—they are simultaneously a major cause and a potential solution. Across the world, a new wave of urban social movements is rising to fight against corporate control, social exclusion, hostile immigration policies, gender oppression, and ecological devastation. These movements are building economic, social, and political alternatives based on solidarity, equality, and participation. This anthology develops the debates that began at the recent Transnational Institute of Social Ecology’s (TRISE) conference about the dire need to rebuild the social and political realities of our world’s cities. It discusses the prospects of radical urban movements; examines the revolutionary potential of the concept of “the Right to the City,” and looks at how activists, scholars, and community movements can work together towards an ecological and democratic future. A fruitful conversation between theory and practice, this book opens new ground for rethinking systemic urban change in a way that challenges oppression and transforms how people work, create, and live together.
 
[more]
Stand on Guard for Whom?
A People’s History of the Canadian Military
Yves Engler
Black Rose Books, 2021
We Stand on Guard for Whom? is the first book to present a history of the Canadian military from the perspective of its victims. In his eleventh book, Yves Engler, the prolific author and critic of Canadian politics, exposes the reality of Canadian wars, repression, and military culture despite the mythologies of Canada as an agent for international peacekeeping and humanitarianism.
 
Originating as a British force that brutally dispossessed First Nations, the Canadian Forces regularly quelled labor unrest in the decades after Confederation. It would go on to participate in military occupations or invasions in Sudan, South Africa, Europe, Korea, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Libya, as well as Canadian gunboat diplomacy and UN deployments that have ousted elected governments. As the federal government department with by far the greatest budget, staff, PR machine, and intelligence-gathering capacities, this book shows how the Canadian military is a key developer of military technology, including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. It also has an immense ecological footprint and a toxic patriarchal, racist, and anti-democratic culture.
 
However, as this book shows, Canadian militarism has always been contested, as early as opposition to conscription during World War I and as especially during peace activism against the US war in Indochina. More recently, city councils have declared themselves nuclear weapons free zones and prevented hosting of weapons bazaars and, in 2003, antiwar activists stopped Prime Minister Jean Chrétien from leading Canada into the US-led invasion of Iraq. This book reveals the hidden militarism in Canadian life and reminds us that the first step to contest it is to recognize its pervasiveness and power.
[more]
Subcomandante Marcos
Global Rebel Icon
Nicholas Henck
Black Rose Books, 2019
The unexpected insurrection of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994 toppled the notion that the triumph of neoliberalism represented the end of history. In the clamor that followed, a masked, pipe-smoking horseman appeared as the spokesperson for the indigenous rebels.
 
In this book, Nick Henck provides a concise and accessible overview of the life, thought, and achievements of the professor-turned-guerrilla Subcomandante Marcos. Through his academic exodus and immersion in the indigenous communities of the Lacandon jungle, to his participation in a guerilla army, to his eloquent articulation of the struggles of oppressed peoples around the world, Marcos became a revered and inspiring enigma. Henck explores Marcos’s considerable accomplishments in four main fields: his role as spokesperson for the Zapatistas; his contribution to Latin American literature and a new political language for the left; his work in making Mexico a more democratic, inclusive, and just nation; and his role as an inspirational international political icon. Published for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Zapatista uprising, this book is not just a biography but also a reminder that there are alternative ways of doing politics: that another world is possible.
[more]
Subverting Politics
Autonomous Social Movements Today
Edited by Marcos Ancelovici and Francis Dupuis-Déri
Black Rose Books, 2023
An investigation of how social movements and activists can undermine structures of political power by redefining participation.
 
The past decade has witnessed the resurgence of autonomy-inspired movements in many countries across Europe, North America, and Latin America. From the Indignados to the Occupy Movement and Antifa, from Indigenous mobilizations at Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter, and from radical feminists to climate justice activists, the influence of the ideals and practices of autonomy seems more alive and pervasive than ever. Subverting Politics explores how autonomous social movements navigate the state despite overwhelming tides of corporate and political dominance. Featuring essays from various scholars and academics such as Jason Del Gandio, AK Thompson, Miguel A. Martínez, Émeline Fourment, Rachel Sarrasin, and others, this investigation into the rise and resurgence of social movements is extremely timely for readers seeking new political inspirations.
 
[more]
Take the City
Voices of Radical Municipalism
Edited by Jason Toney
Black Rose Books, 2020
With rapid increases in urban populations, there is an urgent need to transform our world’s cities in keeping with ecological imperatives and democratic principles. A growing worldwide citizen movement is attempting to challenge bureaucratic administrations and replace the politics of fear with neighborhood power, direct democracy, and solidarity. They believe that threats of capitalism, totalitarianism, and climate change require imaginative political resistance rooted where they live. 
 
Combining political theory, philosophy, history, and intimate narrative, Take the City! presents an expansive view of municipalist movements around the world. With over twenty contributors, including David Harvey, this anthology provides crucial insights into the challenges ahead by looking at and beyond municipal electoral politics. Stories of diverse regions and issues illuminate the nuances of municipalist movements of the past and present, providing a roadmap of the fight for our future. From Seattle to Kurdistan, Burlington to Oaxaca, Barcelona to Mississippi, and Vienna to Montreal, contributors carefully consider the intertwined questions concerning current crises in housing, the environment, democracy, and capitalism. 
 
[more]
Toward an Ecological Society
Murray Bookchin
Black Rose Books, 1980
Toward an Ecological Society compiles key writings from a seminal period in Murray Bookchin's thought, including essays on urbanism, the relation between ecology and technology, and the ongoing significance of the Nuclear question.  
[more]
Transformative Planning
Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism
Edited by Thomas Angotti
Black Rose Books, 2019
Though modern urban planning is only a century old, it appears to be facing extinction. Historically, urban planning has been narrowly conceived, ignoring gaping inequalities of race, class, and gender while promoting unbridled growth and environmental injustices. In Transformative Planning, Tom Angotti argues that unless planning is radically transformed and develops serious alternatives to neoliberal urbanism and disaster capitalism it will be irrelevant in this century. This book emerges from decades of urban planners and activists contesting inequalities of class, race, and gender in cities around the world. It compiles the discussions and debates that appeared in the publications of Planners Network, a North American urban planners’ association. Original contributions have been added to the collection so that it serves as both a reflection of past theory and practice and a challenge for a new generation of activists and planners.
 
[more]
Triumph Of The Market
Edward Herman
Black Rose Books, 1997
The unifying theme of the essays in this volume is the increasing national and global power and reach of the market and its growing impact on all aspects of human life. The phrase "the market" denotes both the corporate institutions that are the leading and dominant factors in production, trade, and finance, and the arrangements, mechanisms, and practices that permit and facilitate the buying and selling of goods and money. Thus, the "triumph of the market" refers to the sharp increase in power, and hegemonic position, of the dominant market participants and to the now almost universal acceptance of market exchanges and private ownership as the exclusive way of organizing economic life.
[more]
The Trudeau Formula
Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent
Martin Lukacs
Black Rose Books, 2020

The Trudeau Formula
Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent
Martin Lukacs
Black Rose Books, 2020
After a decade of Stephen Harper, the arrival of Justin Trudeau as prime minister of Canada felt like a relief. But as Canadians reckon with the gulf between the dazzling promise of Trudeau’s election and the grim reality of his government, journalist Martin Lukacs makes the case that “real change” was never part of the agenda.
 
Drawing on investigative research and first-hand reporting, Lukacs reveals that behind the latest wave of Trudeaumania was a slick status-quo political machine, backed by a cast of corporate elites and lobbyists who expected a pay-off from Liberal rule in Ottawa. He sheds light on a climate plan hatched in collaboration with Big Oil, the arming of a bloody Saudi war in Yemen, a reconciliation industry masking the ongoing theft of Indigenous lands, and the off-loading of public infrastructure to private profiteers—together these signal not a break from Harper, but a continuation of his destructive legacy. Trudeau’s much-hyped new politics, Lukacs argues, were in fact an Instagram-era spin on an old Liberal approach: playing to people’s desire for far-reaching change in order to ward off a backlash against the Canadian elite.
 
But as the Trudeau formula unravels, Lukacs warns that right-wing scapegoating politicians are misdirecting this growing discontent with the established order. He argues that the only way to defeat the rise of an ugly right—and fulfill the hopes betrayed by Trudeau—is an unapologetically bold response to inequality, racism, and climate breakdown. In this election year and beyond, Lukacs contends that it is time for Canada’s progressive majority to abandon the idea of political saviors and renew the task of collectively winning the world we need.
 
[more]
Unknown Revolution
Voline
Black Rose Books, 1975
A famous history of the Russian revolution and its aftermath.  This edition reinstates material that has been omitted from recent editions of the English-language version and reproduces the complete text of the original French volumes.
[more]
Villages in Cities
Community Land Ownership and Cooperative Housing in Milton Parc and Beyond
Josh Hawley and Dimitri Roussopoulos
Black Rose Books, 2018
In Montreal in 1968, speculators announced their ‘urban renewal’ plan to demolish six blocks of the downtown heritage neighborhood of Milton Parc in order to build enormous high-rise condos, hotels, office buildings, and shopping malls. The local community viewed this as a declaration of war. What followed was a remarkable struggle that not only saved the heritage architecture from destruction but also protected local residents from gentrification through the creation of the largest nonprofit cooperative housing project on an urban community land trust in North America.
 
And Milton Parc is not unique. Villages in Cities takes us across North America—to New York, Boston, Burlington, Oakland, Jackson, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver—to show concrete examples of citizens taking back the land and claiming their right to secure housing. The book draws connections among these projects, examines their underlying causes, and connects them with a holistic “Right to the City” movement that is emerging internationally.
 
[more]
Visions of Freedom
Critical Writings on Ecology and Anarchism
Brian Morris
Black Rose Books, 2018
Every ten years, notoriously eclectic thinker Brian Morris takes a year of sabbatical and launches out into another field about which he knows nothing. In the 1980s it was botany; in the 1990s, zoology; in the 2000s, entomology. The quintessential polymath, Morris has written on his incredible breadth of interests in wide-ranging essays, with subjects ranging from boxing to deep ecology to new-age gurus.
 
Collected here for the first time, Visions of Freedom brings together all of Morris’s concise yet diverse essays on politics, history, and ecology written since 1989. It includes book reviews, letters, and articles in the engaging and accessible style for which Morris is known. The thinkers he deals with are as diverse as Thomas Paine to C. L. R. James, from Karl Marx to Krishnamurti, from Max Weber to Naomi Klein. He also delves into the canon of classic anarchist thinkers like Kropotkin, Bakunin, Reclus, Proudhon, and Flores Magnon.
 
Taking a stance against the obscurantism of contemporary academic discourse, Morris’ writings demonstrate an interdisciplinary approach that moves seamlessly between topics, developing practical connections between scholarly debates and the pressing social, ecological and political issues of our times. 
 
[more]
Weaving Another Future
Jineolojî—Readings in Women’s Science
Edited by Jineolojî Komitee Europa
Black Rose Books, 2021
A collection of essays on the intellectual foundation of the Kurdish women’s revolutionary movement.

Over the past decade, Western audiences have grown used to seeing images of Kurdish women in army fatigues fighting as part of Women’s Protection Units in the Syrian Civil War. But these striking images are not the whole story. Kurdish women’s militias are part of a revolution built on a sophisticated intellectual foundation that places the empowerment of women at the center of the struggle for political self-determination. Jineolojî is the name of this new social science, and Weaving Another Future is the first in a series of English-language books, collected and translated from the journal Jineolojî, that illustrate the scope and depth of this lively new discipline. In the wake of Western feminism that struggles to produce profound change in many women’s lives, the promise of Jineolojî is spreading to communities around the world. Weaving Another Future features essays on the goals and methodology of Jineolojî, matriarchal history and society, challenging patriarchal systems, building democratic autonomy outside the state, women's participation in emancipatory struggles, self-defense, and self-governance.
[more]
Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger
Ulrike Klausmann and Marion Meinzerin
Black Rose Books, 1997
There have always been women among pirates and sea robbers. Metaphors of mysterious and destructive femininity may have perennially been assigned to the sea and its dangers, but the real women who sailed on ships steered them, sank with them, commanded them, even commandeered them have been ignored by a history written by and for patriarchal men.  Ample evidence of women pirates and even feminine piracy nonetheless abounds: beginning with ancient legends of Amazon sailors in several cultural traditions, and continuing uninterrupted through a wealth of confirmed historical figures, down to the present.  Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger is an account of piracy through three millennia, in histories of women and men sailing on four seas: the Chinese Straits, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean. Writing with passion and humour, but without romanticizing, or ignoring the unsavoury side of some of their heroines, the authors turn history on its head. Nor do they forget the practical details, even including genuine recipes for shark and other delights.  The volume is introduced by Gabriel Kuhn's essay on anarchism and piracy, "Under the Death's Head." Considering the history of Caribbean piracy and drawing on Stirner and Foucault among others, Kuhn describes a breaking out of structured obedience, an escape from perpetual supervision, a plunge into unpredictability, danger, "everything that makes strong, free action."
[more]
Words Of A Rebel
Peter Kropotkin
Black Rose Books, 1992
Translated, with introduction, by George Woodcock

First published in 1885 in Paris, this collection of articles constitutes Kropotkin’s first book. Originally titled Paroles d’un Revolté, it includes his earliest works from period 1879 to 1882. In the succeeding years it was translated into Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Russian, and Chinese. Long-awaited in English, Words of a Rebel is the first complete translation.

A different work from the more familiar books of the older Kropotkin, it is a product of an anarchist agitator and it derives its interest as much from what it reveals about an important transitional phase in the development of anarchism as it does for what it shows us of Kropotkin himself.

Seeing revolution as a popular insurrection, in the broadest terms, Kropotkin believed that public wealth should belong to its producers and consumers and not to the State or the rich.

This volume of Kropotkin’s articles was translated from the French by George Woodcock. A celebrated author, Woodcock is also an authority on the life and works of Peter Kropotkin and as a result, Words of a Rebel is not just a translation, but a scholarly work as well.

Table of Contents:

Introduction by George Woodcock

Introduction to the First French Edition by Elisée Reclus

I. The Situation Today

II. The Breakdown of the State

III. The Inevitability of Revolution

IV. The Coming Revolution

V. Political Rights

VI. To the Young

VII. War

VIII. Revolutionary Minorities

IX. Order

X. The Commune

XI. The Paris Commune

XII. The Agrarian Question

XIII. Representative Government

XIV. Law and Authority

XV. Revolutionary Government

XVI. All of Us Socialists!

XVII. The Spirit of Revolt

XVIII. Theory and Practice

XIX. Expropriation

Notes


1992: 229 pages
[more]
Year 501
The Conquest Continues
Noam Chomsky
Black Rose Books, 1997
A book by Noam Chomsky.
[more]
Your Freedom and Mine
Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdish Question in Erdogan's Turkey
Edited by Thomas Jeffrey Miley
Black Rose Books, 2018
"Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts… I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated."—From a letter by Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment, February 10, 1985

A revolutionary imprisoned on an island fortress may hold the key to peace in the Middle East. The leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, is considered by many to be the “Kurdish Mandela”, courageously issuing proposals for peace even from his prison cell. His ideas on democracy, women's liberation, and freedom have even inspired the remarkable Rojava Revolution in northern Syria. As Turkey descended into tyranny and Syria exploded in civil war, a peace delegation of European politicians, academics, and journalists, led by Nelson Mandela's lawyer and Supreme Court judge Essa Moosa, repeatedly attempted to go to meet with Öcalan at his prison on Imrali Island. Your Freedom and Mine tells the story of these momentous delegations.
 
The book opens with an informative historical overview of the Kurdish Question, leading up until the optimistic opening—and eventual bitter failure—of the peace process in Turkey. It includes official documents and reports from the Imrali Delegations in Istanbul and Diyarbakir/Amed, which involved in-depth interviews with Kurdish and Turkish politicians, media, and civil society regarding the degenerating political and human rights situation. The final section is a collection of testimonials from delegation participants. Your Freedom and Mine offers crucial insight into the dramatic history and current reality of the Kurdish struggle for recognition and peace in Turkey. 
[more]



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