Autonomedia

06/28/2025

To see an autocrat in full flower, you have to see him in the midst of ordering a violent attack. An autocrat can’t resist that. Giving the order to release the death machines is the only thing that temporarily fills the void within them, the only thing that definitively confirms their power over ...

06/21/2025

In the last days of all empires the idiots take over. They mirror the collective stupidity of a civilization that has detached itself from reality.

01/29/2025

Upcoming event next Thursday at Jefferson Market Library!

11/07/2024

It turns out that one state in the union has 7 of the 10 drunkest cities.

11/04/2024

At the end of July, shortly after Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate for President, The Economist described her father, Donald Harris, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford with whom she reportedly has little contact, as “a combative Marxist.” In September’s Presidential debate, Donald Trump expanded the charge, calling both father and daughter Marxists. In a rare interview with the older Harris, who hasn’t engaged with the press in years, he tells John Cassidy, “Marx himself said, ‘I am not a Marxist.’ . . . Speaking for myself and my work, I could say the same today as Marx did back then. But I need not do so. I cannot accept responsibility for, or a need to respond to, the ignorance and illiteracy of those in the media or elsewhere.” He continues, “All of my work is in the public domain. Anyone who takes the time and trouble to review it will see there the meaning.”

In recent weeks, Cassidy read as much of Harris’s research and work as he could—academic papers, policy briefs, articles—and spoke with some of Harris’s former colleagues and students. “What emerged was a portrait of a deeply serious scholar, and one not easily pigeonholed,” Cassidy writes. Read his full essay: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/XuEFFq

09/25/2024

Among the world’s leading academic critics, he brought his analytical rigor to topics as diverse as German opera and sci-fi movies.

08/11/2024

Tanya Sullivan and Okra B Di**le bring Autonomadic Bookmobile to Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, doing a sort of circus sideshow performance to promote books of Autonomedia and other small publishers; photo (M)

12/20/2023

https://www.newsbreak.com/news/3270524257850-cnn-looks-back-at-trump-s-past-interest-in-adolf-hitler?_f=app_share&s=i1&pd=0E7QmK1J&lang=en_US&send_time=1703021604&trans_data=%7B%22platform%22%3A0%2C%22cv%22%3A%2223.49.0.27%22%2C%22languages%22%3A%22en%22%7D

11/16/2023

We've published a new edition of Kirkpatrick's Sale history of SDS, originally released by Random House in 1973. With the author’s new contextual preface, 50 years after original publication. Link to order in comments.

SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society, was one of the largest national student activist organizations of the 1960s, with over 300 college campus chapters by 1965. This influential New Left group was founded in 1960 as a student offshoot of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy (LID). With the publication in 1962 of their manifesto, The Port Huron Statement, SDS outlined their belief in participatory democracy and their goal to fight social injustices through non-violent means. Initially the group focused on promoting citizen engagement with politics and the civil rights movement, but pivoted to anti-war demonstrations and protests of the Vietnam War and the draft, and then to anti-communist, anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian struggles more generally. While SDS ultimately splintered and disbanded in 1969, in more recent years younger students have struggled to revive it.

“Sale’s objective and detailed treatment of this period… gives the best overall sense of what was transpiring.” — Abbie Hoffman

“This big, painstakingly researched history… easily qualifies as the definitive work.” — New York Times

“Written just years after the collapse of the organization, and with access to their extensive archives…. Full of first-hand accounts organized chronologically through the organization’s ten-year history… an essential source for research.”— Anti-imperialist.org

“Sale gives us…a history of tactics more and more radical followed by repression more and more severe.” — Journal of Contemporary Sociology

11/15/2023

“Either we submit to the dissociative logic of the web, or we turn to forms of defending embodied life.”

Communion is the second issue of Woodbine’s printed journal The Reservoir, featuring new texts by Kazembe Balagun, Elizabeth Povinelli, Geert Lovink, Kristin Ross, Experimental Jetset, and Marcello Tarì, as well as a previously unpublished interview with Félix Guattari. Released in September, $12, link to order in comments.

From the introduction: “The theme for this issue, Belief and the Communal, was a question to ourselves – not just a documentation of who and what we are, but a critical consideration of who we would like to be. To speak of belief carries with it the sense not just of logic but of faith. History tells us that successful experiments in communal life often have an organizing belief. They have a shared faith. But when our structures of life are oriented around the instrumental and utilitarian, the non-religious and secular, how can we re-enchant the world, the city, each other? How can we mobilize networks of newly binding enchantments for the next epoch of societal re-organization? For us this question touches on the old anarchist framework of free association, of the voluntary assembly of individuals. Needed ever-more in a metropolis like New York, but ever more rare and fleeting. It touches on the question of desire, to gather outside of work, outside of the market, to cultivate a generosity of thought and spirit, of time and attention.”

Communion features archival texts by and reflections on Black Mountain College and the Gate Hill artists cooperative, Murray Bookchin, the Catholic Worker, Co-op City, Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall and Ganienkeh, George Jackson and The Black Panther Party, Llano del Rio, Provo, M.C. Richards, the Shakers, the ZAD, and more. With original art, comics, essays, fiction, illustrations, interviews, letters, photography, poetry, transcripts, and translations from more than 30 contributors, and design by Kevin McCaughey.

01/31/2023