[Minorcompositions] Minor Compositions Fall 2011 Books

Mon Dec 19 22:39:51 UTC 2011

Greetings,

This year is quickly winding to a close... but it's been quite a busy 
fall for Minor Compositions, with five new books titles released. So 
without any further delay, here's the information on those:

Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination

David Graeber

Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial 
institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. There 
is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will 
no longer exist: for the simple reason that it's impossible to maintain 
an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Yet faced with 
this prospect, the knee-jerk reaction is often to cling to what exists 
because they simply can't imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even 
more oppressive and destructive. The political imagination seems to have 
reached an impasse. Or has it?

In this collection of essays David Graeber explores a wide-ranging set 
of topics including political strategy, global trade, debt, imagination, 
violence, aesthetics, alienation, and creativity. Written in the wake of 
the anti-globalization movement and the rise of the war on terror, these 
essays survey the political landscape for signs of hope in unexpected 
places.

At a moment when the old assumption about politics and power have been 
irrefutably broken the only real choice is to begin again: to create a 
new language, a new common sense, about what people basically are and 
what it is reasonable for them to expect from the world, and from each 
other. In this volume Graeber draws from the realms of politics, art, 
and the imagination to start this conversation and to suggest that that 
the task might not be nearly so daunting as we'd be given to imagine.

More information <http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=284>

Buy the book here 
<http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=71&products_id=677> 

+++

Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and 
Contemporary Struggles

Edited by Benjamin Noys

Can we find alternatives to the failed radical projects of the twentieth 
century? What are the possible forms of struggle today? How do we fight 
back against the misery of our crisis-ridden present? 'Communization' is 
the spectre of the immediate struggle to abolish capitalism and the 
state, which haunts Europe, Northern California and wherever the real 
abstractions of value that shape our lives are contested. Evolving on 
the terrain of capitalism new practices of the 'human strike', 
autonomous communes, occupation and insurrection have attacked the 
alienations of our times. These signs of resistance are scattered and 
have yet to coalesce, and their future is deliberately precarious and 
insecure.

Bringing together voices from inside and outside of these currents 
Communization and Its Discontents treats communization as a problem to 
be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorizations of 
communization proposed by Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, Théorie 
Communiste, post-autonomists, and others, it offers critical reflections 
on the possibilities and the limits of these contemporary forms, 
strategies, and tactics of struggle.

More information <http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=299>

Buy the book here 
<http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=71&products_id=676> 

+++

19 & 20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism

Colectivo Situaciones, with introductions by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

New book from Colectivo Situaciones... an 18^th Brumaire for the 21^st 
Century: militant research on the December 19^th and 20^th , 2001 
uprisings in Argentina... In the heat of an economic and political 
crisis, people in Argentina took to the streets on December 19^th , 
2001, shouting /"¡Qué se vayan todos!"/ These words -- "All of them 
out!" -- hurled by thousands banging pots and pans, struck at every 
politician, economist, and journalist. These events opened a period of 
intense social unrest and political creativity that led to the collapse 
of government after government. Neighborhoods organized themselves into 
hundreds of popular assemblies across the country, the unemployed 
workers movement acquired a new visibility, workers took over factories 
and businesses. These events marked a sea change, a before and an after 
for Argentina that resonated around the world.

Colectivo Situaciones wrote this book in the heat of that December's 
aftermath. As radicals immersed within the long process of reflection 
and experimentation with forms of counterpower that Argentines practiced 
in shadow of neoliberal rule, Colectivo Situaciones knew that the 
novelty of the events of December 19th and 20th demanded new forms of 
thinking and research. This book attempts to read those struggles from 
within. Ten years have passed, yet the book remains as relevant and as 
fresh as the day it came out. Multitudes of citizens from different 
countries have learned their own ways to chant /¡Qué se vayan todos!/, 
from Iceland to Tunisia, from Spain to Greece, from Tahrir Square to 
Zuccotti Park. Colectivo Situactiones' practice of engaging with 
movements' own thought processes resonates with everyone seeking to 
think current events and movements, and through that to build a new 
world in the shell of the old.

More information <http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=331>

Buy the book here 
<http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=71&products_id=682> 

+++

Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, 
Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty

Ed. Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson

Individualist anarchists believe in mutual exchange, not economic 
privilege. They believe in freed markets, not capitalism. They defend a 
distinctive response to the challenges of ending global capitalism and 
achieving social justice: eliminate the political privileges that prop 
up capitalists.

Massive concentrations of wealth, rigid economic hierarchies, and 
unsustainable modes of production are not the results of the market 
form, but of markets deformed and rigged by a network of state-secured 
controls and privileges to the business class. /Markets Not Capitalism 
/explores the gap between radically freed markets and the 
capitalist-controlled markets that prevail today. It explains how 
liberating market exchange from state capitalist privilege can abolish 
structural poverty, help working people take control over the conditions 
of their labor, and redistribute wealth and social power.

Featuring discussions of socialism, capitalism, markets, ownership, 
labor struggle, grassroots privatization, intellectual property, health 
care, racism, sexism, and environmental issues, this unique collection 
brings together classic essays by leading figures in the anarchist 
tradition, including Proudhon and Voltairine de Cleyre, and such 
contemporary innovators as Kevin Carson and Roderick Long. It introduces 
an eye-opening approach to radical social thought, rooted equally in 
libertarian socialism and market anarchism.

More information <http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=230>

Buy here 
<http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=71&products_id=672>

+++

Undressing the Academy, or The Student Handjob

University of Strategic Optimism

The weary student handbook genre is in need of a belligerent mauling. 
This is our crack at the job. We don't want to talk down to anyone, but 
neither do we want to chat them up, so this is an attempt at thinking 
out the university from our own perspective, that of students. Here we 
air our dirty snapshot of the academy, at least semi-naked, just as we 
come across it. This potted guide is our pot shot at undressing and 
dressing down this place, the university, and understanding our place 
within it: its problems and potential, its power-relations and its 
possibilities for politicization. This is our attempt to share some of 
the knowledge to be gleaned in the university, but a knowledge that is 
rarely measured on any certificate come graduation day.

Written collectively by the University for Strategic Optimism, in the 
queasy come-down afterglow of the recent wave of student activism in the 
UK (but looking forward to cracking-off another round), this guide 
attempts to contextualize our struggle and to bring it closer to home. 
Just what is the university that we are fighting for anyway? And what 
perhaps could it be?

More information <http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=272>

Buy the book here 
<http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&cPath=71&products_id=681> 

+++

The line up for 2012 is looking quite good as well, with forthcoming 
collections on punk rock and the academy, a re-mixable version of 
/Utopia/, reflections on the occupation movements, and an autonomist 
reworking of the history of the avant-garde. Stay tuned for more soon, 
and have a happy winterval!

Cheers

Stevphen

--

:: MinorCompositions ::

http://www.minorcompositions.info

Wivenhoe // New York // Port Watson

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