Anarchism suggested reading?

Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy (a trilogy in five parts)

Really? Hmm.

As much as I don't like crimethinc, this a fucking powerful booklet.

(at least in making hippys think that anarkey is coolio)

The Free. Mike Gilliland (nice bloke too), i've just re-read it, as someone reminded me of it, in another thread.

Another corking book from the now defunct (i think) Attack international, who did tintin's "Breaking Free".

'Anarchism' by 'Sean M. Sheehan' was quite good. published by the 'FOCI' section of 'REAKTION BOOKS'

ahahaha.

...speaking of which, has anyone read much of Negri? It's just his "Time for Revolution" seemed like the only half decent book in the Politics section of my local bookshop.

...well, yeah, afterall you know me so well.

How's Volume III of Capital? Or have you developed a life yet?

Conspectus of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy by Marx http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm

The Poverty of Philosophy by Marx http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/index.htm

The Bakuninists at Work by Engels http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1873/bakunin/index.htm

I read Vol 2 before I read Vol 1, 'cause they didn't have Vol 1 at my local library. Not that I'd recommend doing that.

<= me as a nipper

Thanks for the references.

My Revolutionary Reading Guide not only lists a lot of anarchist texts, it also lists a lot of them under histories, but it is not in the library. Private me and I can e-mail it to you. I wiould also appreciate if anyone would like to update and add to the Guide with anarchist references. right now its almost 80 pages. compiled over 10 years and in need of some updates (about 5 pages worth right now...

Off the top of my head...

Daniel Guerin's book Anarchism is ok, but his collection of anarchist authors No Gods, No Masters is very good.

Society of the Spectacle is simply not an anarchist book, though I think they have a pretty measured asessment of the limits of Marx and Bakunin and of anarchism in the international workers' movement through Spain. That is only one section of the book and the most readable and easily digested, the rest is much harder and requires a lot of background to weed out what is useful and what is not.

http://www.spunk.org/index.html has a lot of great stuff

So does Anarchy Archives http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/, my personal favorite.

I am fond of Nestor Makhno, esp his debate with Errico Malatesta, as well as Malatesta's and Makhno's writings, each collected in a slim volume of their own.

Kropotkin's Communism and Anarchy is interesting.

Avrich's book on the Russina Anarchists is decent enough.

There is some good work on Durruti and the Durruti Column, who played an exceptionally good role in the Spanish revolution.

There are a few good books on the IWW and Big Bill Haywood's autobiography, while thin on theory, is a rich and interesting book.

If you want some critiques of anarchist theory and practice, you already have the references on Marx and Engels, which address some of the differences from their perspective. Engels gets a bad shake on the political stuff, IMO. He was a very good historian and an astute political thinker, but theoretically I don't think he ever quite got what Marx was doing and played a negative role in theoretical matters after Marx's death.

Part of the problem is that after WWII, really after Spain, anarchism is hard to find in the workers' movement, and seems to put out very little of interest theoretically until the 1990's, which means a near-50 year blank space. However, the Library here has a few good things we collected for Endpage (Sam Dolgoff, for example)

From within the libcom milieu, there is not a lot I find that interesting beyond the SI, Marx and Engels. A lot of contemporary libcom Marxists, like myself, do not see there being huge practical barriers to co-operation and referring to ourselves collectively as libertarian comunists, in opposition to Leninists and social democrats of various sorts.

I frankly don't see what Negri has to do with anarchism. Then again, I don't see him as terribly interesting, esp his recent work.

cheers,

chris

I don't think you need to read any books about anarchism, it's just common sense

plus there's the www.anarchistfaq.org which is useful

feh, lots of recycled academic structuralist marxism and Deleuze-Guattari garbage, overblown post-modernist language games, and almost nothing in the way of empirical material.

The few interesting ideas sprinkled in the book just aren't worth it and could have been done in a 100 page pamphlet with substantive empirical material included.

chris

It is now although I need to find a way to filter the html code so the links work - it's just in text format at the moment.

Ooh, I do apologise.

Today I seen this old copy of the second volume printed in Moscow in the Stalinist era, with a imprint of Marx's big fat head on the cover. I thought it was soo cool that I nearly bought it, but it was like 30 quid or something. I've read a lot of basic "Marxist" economics already so it might be generally interesting but I dunno...

How long did it take you to read the first volume and do you have a good grasp of it? Can I not just get the abridged version?