Saul D. Alinsky: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971/1989)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, community, politics, radicalism, tactics
The father of modern community organization, Saul Alinsky taught a generation of activists and politicians how to effectively construct social change. In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky writes with passion and intelligence, carefully outlining “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.” Indispensable since its first publication in 1971, this book continues to inform and inspire all those who believe that political engagement is the key to maintaining America’s democratic tradition.
Originally published by Random House, New York, 1971
Publisher Vintage Books, a division of Random House, New York, October 1989
ISBN 0679721134, 9780679721130
224 pages
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers Industrial Efficiency (1916)
Filed under pamphlet | Tags: · activism, labour, resistance, sabotage
The famous pamphlet advocating a more direct approach to the class struggle.
“The interest in sabotage in the United States has developed lately on account of the case of Frederick Sumner Boyd in the state of New Jersey as an aftermath of the Paterson strike. Before his arrest and conviction for advocating sabotage, little or nothing was known of this particular form of labor tactic in the United States. Now there has developed a two-fold necessity to advocate it: not only to explain what it means to the worker in his fight for better conditions, but also to justify our fellow-worker Boyd in everything that he said. So I am desirous primarily to explain sabotage, to explain it in this two-fold significance, first as to its utility and second as to its legality.” (from the Introduction)
Publisher Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) Publishing Bureau, Chicago, IL, October 1916
via Archive.org
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Philippe Pignarre, Isabelle Stengers: Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2005–) [FR, EN]
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, capitalism, magic, philosophy, protest, resistance, witchcraft
“If denunciation were effective, capitalism would have disappeared a long time ago. But denunciation is never enough. Capitalism is a system that reinvents itself permanently, through the creation of infernal alternatives, alternatives which take us all hostage: ‘if we don’t cut the deficit, we’ll never regain our competitiveness’.
In other traditions than that of the moderns, this sort of paralysis would be described as sorcery. Capitalist Sorcery takes this idea seriously – literally – and explores the consequences of our vulnerability to a system which daily recruits the minions that it needs to cast its spells.
Proposing a pragmatic reading of Marx, a reading which seeks to ward off the thoughtlessness encouraged by the theme of progress and the resignation that arises from accepting that capitalism is the ‘only game in town’, the authors look at how we can protect ourselves from the logic which – from financial collapse through GM foods to oil spills and climate catastrophe – runs scared of the cry ‘another world is possible’.”
La sorcellerie capitaliste: Pratiques de désenvoûtement
Afterword by Anne Vièle
Publisher La Découverte, Paris, 2005
ISBN 2707143979
228 pages
English edition
Translated and edited by Andrew Goffey
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
ISBN 0230237622, 9780230237629
224 pages
La sorcellerie capitaliste (French, 2005)
Capitalist Sorcery (English, 2011)