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Anarchism And Its Aspirations (2009)

by Cindy Milstein(Favorite Author)

3.94 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1849350019 (ISBN13: 9781849350013)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

AK Press

series

Anarchist Intervention Series

review 1: This book is such a great resource! It's certainly for folks already with some knowledge of anarchism and/or leftist politics. It certainly gave me much better context, history, and appreciation for anarchist impetus and influence. I would have liked a little more structure. The book is a quick read and largely hinges on the Battle of Seattle. That specific event works well as an anchor for larger anarchist history and contribution but a little mapping of what would be covered thematically and chronologically would have helped me. I also need a lot more anarchist study. The authors mentioned certainly piqued my interest but I felt a bit green to the whole topic. That said, I really appreciate Milstein's work and presentation. She's truly readable, relatable, and i... morenspiring! I'm grateful for her work!
review 2: One of the most common questions I hear is people asking for nice books that provide a basic idea of what Anarchism actually is and what it stands for. I finally have a book by someone who's written it recently, and is still alive, so this is the one I'm going to recommend. "Anarchism and Its Aspirations" by Cindy Milstein is a short, concise but great intro text which you can read in a few hours. The book paints anarchism as a hopeful school of thought that sees the best in humanity while recognizing that centralized power and inequality does bad things to human condition. Milstein points out what anarchists are for as well as the usual idea of what they are against, freedom "to choose" as well as freedom "from wants", something that liberalism and capitalism both miss by overemphasizing one over the other.Anarchism also poses the way to do it, by organizing from the bottom up as democratically as possible instead of top-down, working to change things in the hear and now as well as visioning a better world. Anarchists traditionally have tried to live the change they want to see, pre-figuring their politics into their organizations. They also actively work to create spaces that envision what they're looking to create, like social centers and infoshops. Anarchists also recognize that there is a democratic impulse within people and that often revolutions come about when this impulse reaches a breaking point, only to be later crushed by the people who take power in the name of the revolution, as can be seen in the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Mexican Revolution, Spanish Revolution, or more recently in Gwangju, South Korea. Anarchism is anti-state and anti-capitalist, a libertarian form of socialism, and shares a similar vision with groups who do not consider themselves Anarchists, like the zapatistas, council communists, autonomous marxists, or the situationists. And one of the nice things, Milstein points out, is that it leaves room for disagreement beyond that, especially in the forms of emphasis, whether it be on class struggle, racial politics, women's liberation, queer liberation, ecological justice, or some combination of these and more.I've called myself an anarchist for nearly a decade now, and I've got to say that this is probably the best recently published book I've read on anarchism, and deserves to be placed amongst the classics. less

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