He saw how the international law of the Eurocentric era of world history began to falter at the end of World War I and foundered at the end of World War II. Following World War II, belligerent acts around the world began to assume a distinctly partisan character, and the belligerents were increasingly non-state actors. His Theory of the Partisan originated in two lectures that Schmitt delivered in 1962, which addressed the transformation of war in the post-European age. Schmitt concludes Theory of the Partisan with the statement: "The theory of the partisan flows into the question of the concept of the political, into the question of the real enemy and of a new nomos of the earth." Theory of the Partisan analyzes a specific and significant phenomenon that ushered in a new theory of war and enmity. It contains an implicit theory of the terrorist, which in the 21st century has ushered in yet another new theory of war and enmity. Consequently, this work is not only of historical interest, but is relevant to contemporary political and military developments and concerns.

    And while the reality of the devastation is undeniable, there is  reason for hope in at least one small pocket of the nation: the cantons of Rojava in Syrian Kurdistan, where in the wake of war people are quietly building one of the most progressive societies in the world today. Revolution in Rojava tells the story of Rojava's groundbreaking experiment in what they call democratic confederalism, a communally organized democracy that is fiercely anti-capitalist and committed to female equality, while rejecting reactionary nationalist ideologies. Rooted in the ideas of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, the system is built on effective gender quotas, bottom-up democratic structures, far-sighted ecological policies, and a powerful militancy that has allowed the region to keep ISIS at bay. This first full-length study of democratic developments in Rojava tells an extraordinary and powerfully hopeful story of a little-known battle for true freedom in dark times.

    Italian political thinker Paolo Virno argues that the category of "multitude," elaborated by Spinoza and for the most part left fallow since the seventeenth century, is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of "people," favored by classical political philosophy. Hobbes, who detested the notion of multitude, defined it as shunning political unity, resisting authority, and never entering into lasting agreements. "When they rebel against the state," Hobbes wrote, "the citizens are the multitude against the people." But the multitude isn't just a negative notion, it is a rich concept that allows us to examine anew plural experiences and forms of nonrepresentative democracy. Drawing from philosophy of language, political economics, and ethics, Virno shows that being foreign, "not-feeling-at-home-anywhere," is a condition that forces the multitude to place its trust in the intellect. In conclusion, Virno suggests that the metamorphosis of the social systems in the West during the last twenty years is leading to a paradoxical "Communism of the Capital."

    With a new afterword by the author about Chiapas today and its successes and failures.

    Advocated here are—among other things—universal conscription, the full acknowledgment of envy and resentment as a fundamental challenge to any communist society, and the acceptance that the division between work and leisure cannot be overcome. To create a new world, we must first change the way we envision the world. Jameson’s text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on the alternatives to global capitalism. In addition to Jameson’s essay, the volume includes responses from philosophers and political and cultural analysts, as well as an epilogue from Jameson himself.Many will be appalled at what they will encounter in these pages—there will be blood! But perhaps one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the Left a chance.

    From Western Europe to Africa, many existing states are either combining into larger communities or falling apart. Many of their functions are likely to be taken over by a variety of organizations that, whatever their precise nature, are not states. In this unique volume Martin van Creveld traces the story of the state from its beginnings to its end. Starting with the simplest political organizations that ever existed, he guides the reader through the origins of the state, its development, its apotheosis during the two World Wars, and its spread from its original home in Western Europe to cover the globe. In doing so, he provides a fascinating history of government from its origins to the present day. This original book will of interest to historians, political scientists and sociologists.

    It chronicles America’s transformation, beginning in 1880, into a nation of consumers, devoted to a cult of comfort, bodily well-being, and endless acquisition. 24 pages of photos.

    Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom. Nevertheless, in his prison notebooks, he recorded thousands of brilliant reflections on an extraordinary range of subjects, establishing an enduring intellectual legacy.Columbia University Press's multivolume Prison Notebooks is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. The notebooks' integral text gives readers direct access not only to Gramsci's influential ideas but also to the intellectual workshop where those ideas were forged. Extensive notes guide readers through Gramsci's extraordinary series of reflections on an encyclopedic range of topics. Volume 1 opens with an introduction to Gramsci's project, describing the circumstances surrounding the composition of his notebooks and examining his method of inquiry and critical analysis. It is accompanied by a detailed chronology of the author's life. An unparalleled translation of notebooks 1 and 2 follows, which laid the foundations for Gramsci's later writings. Most intriguing are his earliest formulations of the concepts of hegemony, civil society, and passive revolution.

    The work called for total devotion to a revolutionary lifestyle. Its publication in the Government Herald in July 1871 as the manifesto of the Narodnaya Rasprava secret society was one of the most dramatic events of Nechayev's revolutionary life, through its words and the actions it inspired establishing Nechayev's importance for the Nihilist movement. The Catechism is divided into two sections; General Rules of the Organisation and Rules of Conduct of Revolutionaries, 22 and 26 paragraphs long respectively; abridged versions were published as excerpts in the anarchist periodicals Freiheit and The Alarm.The most radical document of its age, the Catechism outlined the authors' revolutionary Jacobin program of organisation and discipline, a program that became the backbone of the radical movement in Russia. The revolutionary is portrayed in the Catechism as an amoral avenging angel, an expendable resource in the service of the revolution, committed to any crime or treachery necessary to effect the downfall of the prevailing order.

    In this political essay, Ivan Illich calls for the right to useful unemployment: a positive, constructive, and even optimistic concept dealing with that activity by which people are useful to themselves and others outside the production of commodities for the market.

    Tracing the history, ideas and influences of this radical and inspiring movement from dada to postmodernism, it argues that situationist ideas of art, revolution, everyday life and the spectacle continue to inform a variety of the most urgent poltical events, cultural movements, and theoretical debates of our times.

    The author/illustrator is an Argentinian living in Spain where the book was first published in 2016. His tumultuous life begins with his immigration from Ukraine to Argentina, followed by his assassination of Colonel Falcon (who presided over the slaughter of 100 workers) in 1909. Banished to a penal colony, he escaped, was recaptured and tortured, serving a total of twenty years. Upon release he joined the Spanish Revolution, after which he decamped for Mexico, where he died in 1956 while employed at a toy factory. Stuart Christie, author of Granny Made Me an Anarchist, introduces the AK Press edition.“While Radowitzky’s story has been told … it has never been told in quite the way Agustín Comotto tells it. Through a series of flashbacks [Prisoner 155] examines the agonies and survival of an exceptional individual.” —Guardian“Comotto’s Prisoner 155 is, in my view, a truly great work, comparable to Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, rich with complexity and ambiguity, and whose shy and sensitive central character, a committed humanist imbued with a deep sense of justice who never expressed regret for the two lives he took, remains an enigma. He was one of countless men and women, the salt of the earth, most of them anonymous, who chose to resist against an unjust, class-ridden society in the hope of building a better world for humanity.” —Stuart Christie, from the foreword

    At his trial for initiating an uprising against Batista’s dictatorship in 1953, he was sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment. He was released twenty months later due to public pressure, and within six years he marched triumphantly into Havana at the head of the Cuban Revolution.

    And yet in many ways, these daring men remain little known to us. Like most other poor working people of the past, they left few first-hand accounts of their lives. But their lives are not beyond recovery. In this book, Marcus Rediker uses a huge array of historical sources (court records, diaries, travel accounts, and many others) to reconstruct the social cultural world of the Anglo-American seamen and pirates who sailed the seas in the first half of the eighteenth century. Rediker tours the sailor's North Atlantic, following seamen and their ships along the pulsing routes of trade and into rowdy port towns. He recreates life along the waterfront, where seafaring men from around the world crowded into the sailortown and its brothels, alehouses, street brawls, and city jail. His study explores the natural terror that inevitably shaped the existence of those who plied the forbidding oceans of the globe in small, brittle wooden vessels. It also treats the man-made terror--the harsh discipline, brutal floggings, and grisly hangings--that was a central fact of life at sea. Rediker surveys the commonplaces of the maritime world: the monotonous rounds of daily labor, the negotiations of wage contracts, and the bawdy singing, dancing, and tale telling that were a part of every voyage. He also analyzes the dramatic moments of the sailor's existence, as Jack Tar battled wind and water during a slashing storm, as he stood by his brother tars in a mutiny or a stike, and as he risked his neck by joining a band of outlaws beneath the Jolly Roger, the notorious pirate flag. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea focuses upon the seaman's experience in order to illuminate larger historical issues such as the rise of capitalism, the genesis the free wage labor, and the growth of an international working class. These epic themes were intimately bound up with everyday hopes and fears of the common seamen.

    Indeed, he might be regarded as the first proponent of what is called anarcho-capitalism. Molinari was steeped in the old liberal worldview of Bastiat and hence was a dedicated champion of private property and free markets. But Molinari took matters further to argue that markets were also better at providing the service that the state claimed was its monopoly privilege: the provision of security itself. His singular contribution, then, was to lead us away from the false assumption of Hobbes that somehow the state was necessary to keep society from devolving into chaos. On the contrary, argued Molinari, the voluntary society is the source of order that comes from freedom itself. There is no contradiction or even tension between liberty and security. If free enterprise works well in one sector, it can work well in other sectors too.Molinari was indeed a radical but in the sense that foreshadowed the development of American libertarian thought: a radical for capitalism in all areas of life, which is another way of saying that he was a consistent champion of the fully free society. Perhaps there was a time when people could regard the government monopoly on police and courts as benign, part of the "night watchmen" state advocated by the old-time classical liberals. But the march of the police state has changed that: we are more likely to understand that the state's "security" services are the gravest threat to liberty we face. In that sense, Molinari is the man of the hour.[Description taken from Mises.org]