Philosophy

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Zine Library Index

Education

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Anarchist Studies Vol 16, Isssue 2 by Saul Newman, Benjamin Noys, Todd May, Benjamin Franks, Lewis Call & Jacques Ranciere – Download

Including Benjamin Franks Essay; Postanarchism and Meta-Ethics:

“Competing versions of anarchism are often identifiable through analysis of their distinctive normative ethical approaches. Individualist or ‘philo-sophical’ anarchisms, such as those influenced by Robert Paul Wolff or Robert Nozick, are often based on deontological theories, which privilegea discourse of ‘rights’ and ‘individual autonomy’. By contrast social anarchisms are often either consequentialist (for instance Sergei Nechaev) – and thus prioritise good social outcomes – or prefigurative (for example, James Guillaume) and as such are more consistent with practise-based virtue ethics.

More recently, postanarchists, such as Saul Newman, have highlighted important meta-ethical differences between the various anarchist constellations. In particular there is tension between the universalism of moral realism (that moral statements are objectively verifiable based onuniversal standards) and narrow subjectivist positions (right and wrong are based on individual opinion). The strengths and weaknesses of these competing meta-ethical presuppositions are assessed to show that neither moral realism nor subjectivism are a sufficient to ground anti-hierarchical ethics. In their place a multi-functionalist alternative (that values can be assessed in relation to particular arenas, which intersect, and whose standards adapt) is proposed.”

Can Franks’ Practical Anarchism Avoid Moral Relativism? by Thomas Swann – Download

“Benjamin Franks’ recent contribution to the field of anarchist political philosophy, what he calls ‘prefigurative or practical anarchism’, is introduced partly in response to the critique of ‘metanarratives’ made by writers such as Todd May and Saul Newman.

Metanarratives, they argue, are both, in theory, epistemologically suspect and, in practice, repressive of alternative conceptions of the good. This is because metanarratives assert the validity of one goal or end for human society and/or individuals and one morally justifiable mode of acting to achieve this, thus risking the exclusion of other goals and forms of moral agency. Framing social and political action within metanarratives of human nature is regarded by May and Newman, the founders of ‘postanarchist’ theory, as an essential characteristic of the classical anarchisms of the nineteenth century.

While Franks, along with many others, is critical of the postanarchist attack on classical anarchisms, he nonetheless shares their rejection of metanarratives and teleology. The practical anarchism he proposes aims to be sympathetic to this concern and does so by adopting and modifying the social practice theory found in the work of Alasdair MacInture.

This may come as a surprise given MacIntyre’s position as one of the strongest contemporary defenders of the notion of a telos of human life (i.e., that human life has a natural and right end), but it is this exact feature that Franks’ account of social practices eliminates.

The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to assess the consequences of the rejection of metanarratives and telos for Franks’ practical anarchism. Ultimately, I will show that without a teleological approach, practical anarchism collapses into moral relativism and weakens the definition of ‘anarchism’ to such an extent that it becomes useless.”

Critical thinking as an anarchist weapon

The development of an anarchist practice that can act intelligently requires a capacity to analyze the situation in which we are struggling in terms of our desires and our principles. In other words it requires the practice of theory. In order to avoid the transformation of our theoretical endeavors intoideology — the reification of ideas into dominating concepts that control and direct our thinking — it is necessary to grasp certain tools, particularly those that allow us to think critically.

Critical thinking is the practice of examining a situation or an argument, assessing its strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to grasp it and turn it to one’s own ends. This involves the capacity for recognizing fallacious reasoning and methods of manipulating language, facts and emotions.

Street Smarts and Critical Theory Listening to the Vernacular By Thomas McLaughlin

Feral Children and Clever Animals Reflections on Human Nature

The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter – Download

“This essay is excerpted from The Philosophy of the Encounter, a collection of Althusser’s last writings. We are excited to critically re-publish it here. His investigation of the clinamen, of aleatory materialism, of the encounter, has been deeply infuential to us in understanding our own lives and politics, and contemporary and past philosophers and communist and anarchist theorists. It opens space for historical materialism without teleology, for understanding our current hell-world as always contingent and precarious, always on the verge of dissolution, and for thinking about the ways that chance encounters with friends and enemies affect us and our lives. The particles colliding in the swerve might be the historical conditions which just happen to coincide in such a way to allow the birth of capitalism—which means they just as well might not have, in a rejection of orthodox Marxist teleology—or they might simply be the encounters we have with friends from near and far, the creation of small worlds with each other, from which we can fght our enemies and care for each other, until our encounter dissolves and we move apart again. For us, the clinamen grants a certain freedom and lightness: if this world wasn’t predestined but simply happened to result from a certain combination of events, then it might also fall apart at any moment. If we look at the grand arc of human history with an eye for the aleatory, we realize that we are not locked in an eternal hell of capital and the state. While what comes next might be worse, it might also be better, or at least different. As Lucretius put it so many years ago:

So, then, time changes the nature of all the world,
And earth takes one condition, then another,
Can’t bear what it could, and can, what it could not bear.”

Communist Ontology – Download

“There are political entailments or implications to what I’m suggesting. In the first place, in our context here, taking and exercising power is not a goal we can associate with joy or happiness, since power is domination, a continual suppression of potentialities. This has to be the contrary of what revolutionaries desire, especially if they are envisioning a tiqqun, a redemption and repair.”

Questions for Poets – Download

Is it a box of matches burning the museum that displays the art object that is the box of matches? Or is it the box of matches in the hands of a child who knows he is hated in his police-filled school in his police-filled city? Is it the incendiary accident of that child? Is it how can language set fire to that? Is it how to set fire to fire?

The Vengeance of Vertigo – Download

“The Human need to be liberated in the world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world; which is why even their most radical cognitive maps draw borders between the living and the dead.” The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents

Short Circuit – Download

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION and ZAD, COMMUNE, METROPOLIS “Counter-logistics is not simply a matter of blocking all flows, of stopping movement, of locking things in place where they are. It is a matter of blocking those flows that constitute the material and metaphysical tissue of this world, while simultaneously enhancing our own ethical connections, movement, and friendship. Helping migrants to cross borders and remain undetected, helping information to cross through and within prison walls, destroying surveillance cameras, defending the basis of new worlds seized in opposition to the old—these are as important as blocking rail lines and disrupting commerce.”

This book is a collection of critical texts focused on logistics, counter-logistics, and cybernetics. It attempts to combine some disparate groups and tendencies that have all taken a recent turn towards evaluating infrastructure and logistics as a crucial element in the perpetuation of capital and control, and as vulnerable points worthy of study, evaluation, and attack.

The Tyranny of Imagery – Download

“The present is bleak. We are frozen in static images of ourselves. Our ubiquitous digital presence hides a very real absence from our own lives, from relationships of intensity, from motion. And the function of producing identities and categories is becoming more diffuse. We are hemmed in on all sides: by the categories of states and police, by the social networks that identify us, by our own self-creation of identity in our profiles, by those activists who consolidate identity in order to seek recognition and power.”

Robot Seals as Counter Insurgency – Download

“In a world that makes self-care an individual responsibility and a tactic of control, we must re-purpose it by redefining the self: not as some singular entity, but as that which is co-created through the process of friendship. ” Everyday Life in the Cybernetic Desert

Economy, Ecumenes, Communism – Download

“Economy is constituted and develops through the annihilation of every non-economic form of life, since for its regular operation economy needs a reduced, well-formed type of human, self-seeking and thus predictable individuals who can be counted on and are accountable for their actions. Reliability and accountability are the twin necessities for functional economy.”

The Unabomber’s Ethics by Ole Martin Moen – Download

“In this paper I present and criticize Ted Kaczynski’s (‘The Unabomber’) theory that industrialization has been terrible for humanity, and that we should use any means necessary, including violent means, to induce a return to pre-industrial ways of living. Although Kaczynski’s manifesto, ‘Industrial Society and its Future,’ has become widely known, his ideas have never before been subject to careful philosophical criticism. In this paper I show how Kaczynski’s arguments rely on a number of highly implausible philosophical premises. I further make the case that although his theory as a whole should be rejected, Kaczynski raises a number of worries about technological development that ought to receive serious attention. Some of these worries have recently come to be shared by prominent defenders of human enhancement, including Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu. In the last section I indicate why I believe it is important that academic philosophers scrutinize ideas that motivate acts of violence.”

Ethics and American Unionism by Sam Weiner

Fears, tensions and insecurity are sapping our vitality; they are beclouding and twisting our lives. There is a growing realization that nuclear war may soon annihilate us all. This colossal waste of the earth’s riches, this criminal perversion of human life and human labor, violate the deepest, noblest feelings of humanity. Millions of men and women everywhere are today questioning the sanity of the social systems that make such catastrophes possible.

The Philosophy of Defiance (1854) by Félix Pignal

“… Give me any epithets you wish; I accept them all in advance. I have only one thought, and envision only one glory: it is to strike everywhere and always, as much as I can, at the principle of domination. Satan, in his revolt, is my father, and, in his courage, Cain is my brother!

… We do not take a single step in society without hearing that human beings must believe in a God, in a sovereign being, master of all things, according to whose absolute will everything occurs, whether for good or ill.

Well, I claim bluntly that this doctrine is the source of all our miseries and that those—too numerous, alas!—who maintain it, as much by cunning as through ignorance or fanaticism, constantly dig beneath our feet the abyss which must swallow us.

… Some mistreat others,—that is beyond doubt,—and in order to safeguard ourselves against rebellion, we have invented the belief in God.”

The Philosophy of the Bomb by Kartar Singh

“In December 1929, a bomb exploded under the Viceroy Irwin’s special train, from which he, however, escaped. Gandhiji thanked God for the Viceroy’s narrow escape and condemned in his article “The Cult of the Bomb” the revolutionaries for the act. It was in reply to Gandhiji’s article that this outstanding document was written by Bhagawati Charan in consultation with Chandra Shekhar Azad. It was drafted in the room located above the Soloman Company, Aminabad, Lucknow, which was used as a den exclusively by Azad, Bhagawati Charan and Yashpal.”

The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism by Todd May

This book began as a conversation on a train headed from Pittsburgh to Washington to attend the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association. I was trying to explain to a friend, Mark Lance, what the political theory of poststructuralism was all about. He listened more patiently than he should have and then said, “It sounds like anarchism to me.” That comment was the seed of an article, “Is Post-Structuralist Political Theory Anarchist?”—which appeared in Philosophy and Social Criticism in 1989—and eventually of the present work.

Bakunin, Historical Materialism, and Social Philosophy by Brian Morris

“Two chapters from Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom by Brian Morris which illustrate Bakunin’s views in terms of historical materialism and social philosophy which have often been misunderstood or overlooked. ”

The Philosophy of Social Ecology by Murray Bookchin

The Philosophy of Progress by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The Ethics of Anarchism by Bob Green

The Ethics of Egoism by Donald Rooum

The Ethics of Labor Struggle: A Free Market Perspective by Kevin Carson

Politics or Ethics? by Anonymous

Anarchism and the Philosophy of Pragmatism by Wayne Price

The Theory Of The Individual In Chinese Philosophy: Yang-Chou by Alexandra David-Néel

Freedom and Necessity in Nature: A Problem in Ecological Ethics by Murray Bookchin

The Philosophy of Egoism by James L. Walker

The Ethics of the Natural World: An Anarcho-Primitivist Synthesis of William Faulkner’s “The Bear” by Alden Wood

Stirnerian Ethics by W. Curtis Swabey