It so happens that another comrade and I bear primary responsibility for administering and maintaining the blog (which we do under the guidance and supervision of the larger AK Press collective). It is a pleasure for me to play a role in the project.

Given my involvement with Revolution by the Book, I think it is likely that some things that I would have posted on Negations will end up on the AK blog (particularly things like conference announcements, news about publications, etc). I will continue to publish here, but perhaps slightly less regularly and the posts will probably be a little more personal in nature.

The camp’s goal, as explained on its website, is “allow children to live, train, and eventually be schooled year-round without being under contract to fight or having to carry the burden of financially supporting their families; provide women equal opportunities as men do in the sport and all other aspects of their lives; give the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender community a safe haven; thereby, setting a new standard for the way in which such camps are currently being run in Thailand.”

This is a collaborative effort between Nong Thoom (whose life was portrayed in the award-winning film, Beautiful Boxer) and Steven Khan, an American actor, writer, and also a friend of mine and former training partner.

To learn more, check out the following video (the first half is about the Beautiful Boxer and the second about the camp):

Please consider helping make this important initiative a reality. Those in the New York City area can do so by attending a benefit—a sure-to-be exciting, Muay Thai Smoker—on Friday, September 5th. People elsewhere are encouraged to make an online donation.

For more information, check out the Parinya Muay Thai Training Camp website, which you’ll find here.

Art for Change will be presenting Hacia Afuera, the first public art festival in East Harlem-El Barrio to be held in the spring of 2008 and is inviting artists to take part in it with performance, music, site specific installations and interactive media pieces.

East Harlem-El Barrio is a neighborhood with a long history of art, from theater to murals, to performance. In recent years, gentrification has become a reality for many of its residents and thus Hacia Afuera is to be used as a vehicle to reclaim the space especially those that are public.

Works must fit in the political and social context of the neighborhood and must be made of sustainable materials (found, grass, rescued wood) when possible. We are looking for pieces that are highly imaginative but not necessarily complicated in its assembling or in the number of external support that is needed (electricity, extravagant permits, etc).

Budget for the Festival is limited but we will provide materials like basic tools, nails, screws, paint, fabric, soil.

Proposals must be one page in length and should include set-up detail and the ideal location where the piece will be situated. The exact demarcation of where the Festival will take place is still to be decided, but gardens, streets, sidewalks, parks and private walls are possible.

Proposal should also include:

Artistâ s Full Name + Alias (Collectives, teams and community groups are welcome!)
Artistâ s Bio + Statement
Letter of Interest
Dimensions of Piece
Two â Five samples (on DVD, CD)
If performance, indicate duration and number of participants
Time Needed for Set-up
Time Needed for Breakdown
Materials Needed (indicate which you are able to supply)
** Sample documents will not be returned

We are expecting at least 500 visitors throughout the two weekends of the festival. This is a great opportunity to work with existing environments in transforming spaces along with passers-by, residents and visitors.

Please send your application ASAP.
Art for Change/Hacia Afuera
1699 Lexington Ave.
Basement North
New York, NY 10029
Or to info@artforchange.org with â Public Art Proposalâ in the subject line.

The following is a summary of its content (provided by the publishers):

The article by Karl Palmås discusses the possible rupture in the strategies of activist groups, where the abstract mechanism of the motor is replaced by another abstract mechanism – the computer model. Palmås draws from contemporary debates in philosophy and sociology, as well as from recent societal and economical developments. In his case study of the Adbusters movement, he notices a shift in how the practice of resistance is modelled. Instead of “jamming” or “blocking” capitalism, Adbusters have turned to a computer-like model where capitalism is “hacked” or “re-written” just like software. This, in turn, leads to a new agenda for resistance, an agenda which works by making new arrangements instead of blocking the old ones. Palmås’ text introduces an interesting perspective on resistance and social change, which instructs us to look at the abstract mechanisms and models, both in order to understand resistance as such, but also to understand power.

Tim Gough’s “Resistance: Under what Grace” is another theoretical article on how to understand the concept of resistance. He invokes the paradoxical nature of resistance, and its relationship towards the existing prevailing order. When an order is opposed and changed, and resistance triumphs, it immediately turns into a new order, which in turn may be resisted. Since this paradoxical logic is always at work, we must displace the question of a beginning and an end in terms of our common-sense understanding of the concept of time.

Instead of separating resistance and order, Gough suggests an “awareness which in the context this cunning and simultaneity becomes the act of a being which, in its difference, makes that difference an issue for it; this folded characteristic being the very possibility of resistance”.

Jeffrey Shantz too challenges the grand theories of revolution, and instead discusses how anarchist futures are made right now. He draws his examples from the “anarchist transfer culture”, which is attempting at building sustainable communities within the context of the old society. Instead of purely speculative social analysis, the desirable society must be made, and the only way of doing that is to learn the practices. The capitalist relations between consumers and producers, for example, can be overturned, at least on a small scale, by developing gift-economies. We have seen this trend on a large scale in computer software and copyleft media. However, this model is also applicable in building alternative forms of welfare based on mutual aid and autonomous networks, which could endure the trends of the market or the budget of the State. The concept of resistance, then, turns into something readily available in everyday life, not merely reacting against obvious structures of power, but primarily with a potential positive task of building new arrangements. This is why, Shantz argues, the anarchist futures need to be understood in a present tense, since they are already in the making right now.

Patit Paban Mishra rounds up this issue with the historical case of the Orissa tribals in India, which resisted the 1874 revenue settlement imposed by the colonial rule. The settlement led to poverty and misery or the tribal society. However, in heterogeneous constellations the struggle continued up until 1946, displaying the ever-changing dynamic of oppression and resistance.

For more information, visit this link.

I have also been pondering the implications of a new opportunity that just opened up for me: AK Press, the venerable anarchist publishing and distribution house in Oakland, California, recently decided to pay me to do freelance acquisitions for them. Specifically, I will search out writers with promising projects and help them prepare a book proposal for AK, who will remunerate me with a small sum every time that they agree to publish a work that has passed through my hands.

This is very exciting to me. I spent a lot of time cultivating authors during my years with the Institute for Anarchist Studies and The New Formulation (among other projects) and it is something that I genuinely enjoy doing. I love helping a writer clarify his or her ideas, develop his or her voice, and ultimately make a contribution to the anarchist vision. Doing this has always been deeply satisfying for me.

I am also eager to work closely with AK, a project that I hold in the highest regard. I first got to know AK people in the early 1990s through the anarchist scene, our links deepened as the Institute for Anarchist Studies gathered momentum in the latter part of that decade, and our bonds grew stronger still after they asked me to translate Abel Paz’s Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. I have found AK collective members to be among the most committed, friendly, hard-working, patient, disciplined, and fun militants around. And there is no doubt that their efforts have had an extremely positive impact on the American anarchist movement and the left generally: the excellent books that they publish, and the vast amounts of radical literature that they distribute, has raised the level of discussion about the anarchist alternative immeasurably. I, for one, am deeply grateful for all the contributions that they have made.

At present, I am familiarizing myself with AK’s operations and more immediate publishing goals. This month I will participate in a conference call with Zach, Lorna, and Charles, AK’s publishing team, who will fill me in on key details. The four of us also hope to have a short retreat this March, immediately after the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, during which I will learn even more. I hope to be more or less up to speed by April.

Nonetheless, I don’t believe that it’s too early to put out my first call for manuscripts: please contact me if you have a book that you are working on (or considering working on) that you think might be a good fit for the AK catalog! I would be happy to discuss this with you and hopefully help guide you through the process of submitting a proposal.

The truth is that they were quite active and made important contributions to the battles being waged against the military dictatorships in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. While their efforts are largely not reflected in the historical record, this omission says more about biases among historians, and the fear of disclosure that many survivors have inherited from the era, than anarchists’ real significance to the march of events during those terrifying decades.

This is why the recent publication of Verónica Diz and Fernando López Trujillo’s Resistencia Libertaria is such a good thing. Their (Spanish-language) book is the first comprehensive study of Resistencia Libertaria (RL) in any language and will hopefully help bring anarchists into the picture. RL was a clandestine Argentine anarchist organization founded shortly before the Argentine military seized power in 1976. It was active in the student, labor, and neighborhood movements of the time and also had a military wing with which it defended and financed its activities. The group had between 100 and 130 members at its peak as well as a much larger circle of supporters. The state crushed the organization in 1978 and 80 percent of its militants suffered the dictatorship’s concentration camps and torture chambers.

López and Diz qualify their work as a “first approximation” of RL’s history. Their book covers the origins of the group, some of its activities prior to the dictatorship, and the generalized crisis that erupted after the 1976 military coup. It also has five appendices which contain relevant historical documents as well as related articles.

The authors: Fernando López, a historian, is one of the few surviving RL members and author of Vidas en rojo y negro: Una historia del anarquismo en la década infame (Letra Libre, 2005). Verónica Diz is a journalist and professor of history whose work has focused on the relationship between anarchism and feminism.

English readers interested in learning more about Resistencia Libertaria should check out an interview that I conducted with López in 2002: “Resistencia Libertaria: Anarchist Opposition to the Last Argentine Dictatorship.” Spanish readers might wish to download the prologue and first chapter of López and Diz’s book from the publisher’s website. Those interested in contemporary Argentine anarchism may be interested in López’s “Some Notes on the Argentine Anarchist Movement in the Emergency“; for the movement’s early years, see the growing archive of Latin American anarchist material on this site.

Below is a short video documenting the creation of a mural in honor of disappeared members of Resistencia Libertaria. The mural was a project of Argentina’s Organización Socialista Libertaria and the muralists were known as the “Unidad Muralista Hermanos Tello,” a name evoking the memory of the three Tello brothers, who were leading members of RL and are all disappeared.

The publication will be unique not only because of its length but also because of its extensive coverage of the global anarchist movement: it is scheduled to contain a total of 200,000 words (i.e., hundreds and hundreds of pages!) on the topic. It will include entries on the movement in specific countries, biographies of individual anarchists, discussions of key events and themes in the movement’s history, as well as explorations of various tendencies, tactics, institutions, and organizations. Jesse Cohn, author of Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, is the Associate Editor in charge of anarchist content.

Encyclopedia editors are still looking for writers to pen entries on many of the anarchist-related topics that they intend to treat in the book. I recently agreed to write entries on anarchism in Argentina, Mexico, and Puerto Rico (respectively), but many topics remain unassigned. Below is a list of unclaimed entries as of December 18, 2007. Please contact Jesse Cohn if you are interested in taking on one of them.

(Note: The editors are on a tight schedule. Initial drafts of 250 word entries are due on January 14, 2008; 500-1000 word entries need to be in by January 29; and entries of more than 1,000 words must be received by February 25. Production is slated to begin on May Day, 2008.)

I haven’t figured out how to resolve this problem, but I was encouraged by two journals that I read about recently. They are:

The Journal for the Study of Radicalism

The Journal for the Study of Radicalism engages in serious, scholarly exploration of the forms, representations, meanings, and historical influences of radical social movements. With sensitivity and openness to historical and cultural contexts of the term, we loosely define “radical,” as distinguished from “reformers,” to mean groups who seek revolutionary alternatives to hegemonic social and political institutions, and who use violent or non-violent means to resist authority and to bring about change. The journal is eclectic, without dogma or strict political agenda, and ranges broadly across social and political groups worldwide, whether typically defined as “left” or “right.” We expect contributors to come from a wide range of fields and disciplines, including ethnography, sociology, political science, literature, history, philosophy, critical media studies, literary studies, religious studies, psychology, women’s studies, and critical race studies. We especially welcome articles that reconceptualize definitions and theories of radicalism, feature underrepresented radical groups, and introduce new topics and methods of study.

Future issues will include themes like the re-conceptualization of “left” and “right,” radical groups typically ignored in academic scholarship, such as deep ecologists, primitivists, and anarchists, the role of science and technology in radical visions, transnational and regional understandings of radicalism, and the relationships of radical movements to land and environment.

City: Analysis of Urban trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action

City is a journal of provocative, cutting-edge and committed insights into, analysis of, and commentary on the contemporary urban world. We record and analyse cities and their futures, and urbanization from multiple perspectives including: the information and digital revolutions, war and imperialism, neoliberalism and gentrification, environment and sustainability, resistance and social movements, regeneration, resurgence and revanchism, race, class and gender, multi-culturalism and post-colonialism. City combines an analysis of trends, culture, policy and action, and features both historical and theoretical work alongside detailed case studies, policy commentary and open debate.

Besides regular papers and special features, City sections include: ‘Alternatives’ showcasing radical, ‘Grassroots’ approaches; ‘Voices’ featuring literary and ethnographic interpretations; ‘Forum’ presenting commentary on contemporary policy; ‘Prospects and Retrospects’ as well as reviews and Debates.

City is multi-, trans-disciplinary and holistic, drawing on work from academics in geography, the social sciences, political economy, philosophy, cultural studies, and the humanities, as well as from policy makers, the multitude of actors–including practitioners, activists, organizers, writers, artists, ecologists, planners, and architects–who play key roles in sustaining and constructing cities and urban futures.

Among the approximately two dozen individuals involved in the magazine, I note that Paul Chatterton is a “Senior Deputy Editor” and in charge of the “Alternatives” section. He does valuable work on contemporary, direct action movements and is rumored to be seeking anarchist contributors to the publication. I also see that Manuel Castells is an Associate Editor.

And now we can add a new film to the catalogue: Lucio, directed by Aitor Arregi and José Mari Goenaga. This Spanish language documentary tells the dramatic story of Lucio Urtubia, a sort of anarchist Robin Hood whose militancy brought him into contact with some of the most significant events of our era. Although the film does not have subtitles, English readers can check out its synopsis (which I have translated and copied below) and watch its trailer (which has subtitles and is also below).

SYNOPSIS: LUCIO

There have been–and are–many anarchists. Quite a few of them have had to commit robberies or manufacture contraband for the cause. A much smaller number have talked strategy with Che or helped Eldridge Cleaver (the leader of the Black Panthers). But there is only one who, in addition to all of the above, put the world’s most powerful bank on the ropes by producing massive amounts of counterfeit Traveler’s Cheques while also not missing a single day at his bricklayer’s job. His name is Lucio Urtubia.

Lucio presently lives in retirement in Paris. During his life, he witnessed–and often participated actively in–some of the most important events of the second half of the 20th century. He experienced the tumult of May ’68 from within, actively supported the Castro regime during its initial stages, and engaged in a whole range of anti-Franco endeavors. However, his biggest “job” took place in the latter part of the 1970s, a time when he was known in the press as “the good bandit” or “the Basque Zorro.” He defrauded the First National Bank (now Citibank) of 3,000 million pesetas in order to finance causes that he supported. Amazingly, his “career” only cost him a few months in prison.

The film’s official site, which contains photographs and other information, is here.

Professor Norman Cohn, who died on Tuesday aged 92, was a historian, philosopher, linguist, author and expert on persecution, genocide and extermination; his seminal book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the middle ages (1957), earned cult status.

Translated into 11 languages since its initial publication, The Pursuit of the Millennium became Cohn’s best-known work and was acclaimed as one of the most important studies of apocalyptic ideas.

In the book Cohn revealed for the first time the history of revolutionary millenarians, people who believe that the old world is about to be transformed into a new order in which the chosen few reap their reward of an earthly paradise and everyone else perishes.
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Having witnessed at first hand the apocalyptic atrocities of war, Cohn wondered whether the fanatical ideas of the Nazis and Communists were exclusively a 20th-century phenomenon or whether they had more ancient roots. Both tyrannies contained the myth of a final titanic struggle against a demonised enemy – the Jews in the case of Hitler’s Germany, the bourgeoisie in that of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Although working as a linguist when he returned to academic life after the Second World War, Cohn – with no training as an historian but never hidebound – embarked on a quest for the historical origins of these ideas which took him back to the Middle Ages.

Armed with Latin and medieval German and French, he embarked on an 10-year investigation of sources for his book, with the aim of shedding light on the ancient collective fantasies that still exerted an influence on European culture.

In a clear, classical style, Cohn brought obscure medieval documents to life, creating scenes that portrayed, for instance, the starving, blood-spattered flagellants who in 1349 stormed the gates of Frankfurt to slaughter the Jews in a religious-ecstatic orgy of killing; or describing how, in 1251, a raggle-taggle army of paupers, led by a renegade monk, captured the villages of Picardy on the orders of the Virgin Mary.

In 1995, when the Times Literary Supplement listed the 100 non-fiction works that had had the greatest influence on the way in which post-war Europeans perceive themselves, Cohn’s book ranked alongside works by Camus, Sartre, Friedman and Foucault.

At the turn of the century seven years ago, Cohn’s apocalyptic themes again caught the zeitgeist and his book enjoyed a revival, thanks to those people who mistakenly believed that the advent of the new millennium portended the dawn of doomsday. As one critic noted, The Pursuit of the Millennium’s cult status was confirmed by the fact that it was frequently quoted by people who had never even read it.

A modest man of deep convictions who shunned the limelight, Cohn exposed many of the modern world’s collective fantasies, the archaic ideas responsible for much of the cruelty and fanaticism of history which he believed still characterised our thinking.

With his white beard and courtly air, he struck one observer as not unlike the prophets of Armageddon he had spent so many years researching, but “his expression is far milder and his tone epitomises English breeding – formed by the university culture of the interwar period and an upbringing in a bourgeois home with German-Jewish roots”.

Norman Rufus Colin Cohn was born on January 12 1915 in London. His father August was Jewish, his mother Daisy was a Roman Catholic.

He was educated as a scholar of Gresham’s School, Holt, and of Christ Church, Oxford, where in 1936 he took a First in Medieval and Modern Languages. He remained at Oxford as a research student until 1939.

From the outbreak of the Second World War Cohn served in the Queen’s Royal Regiment, and then later in the Intelligence Corps, where his work brought him into contact with both Nazi and Communist ideologies, stimulating his ideas for the book that was to make his name.

Sent to Vienna in 1945, he was assigned to interrogate members of the SS, and met many refugees from Stalin’s reign of terror – experiences that gave rise to questions that would occupy him for most of the rest of his life.

After demobilisation, from 1946 to 1951 Cohn lectured in French at Glasgow University. He was then appointed Professor of French at Magee University College, Londonderry, at that time linked to Trinity College, Dublin. In 1960 he took a similar post at King’s College, Newcastle University.

In 1963 his career as a linguist changed direction completely. He became a professorial fellow at Sussex University and director of the university’s Columbus Centre for studies of persecution and genocide.

The appointment resulted in his book Warrant For Genocide (1967), in which he examined one of the most important sources of the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews, the fraudulent document known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

As the son of a Jew himself, Cohn claimed a personal motive for straying beyond his field of expertise as a medievalist, recalling that many of his relatives in Nazi Germany had perished in the Holocaust. His book traced the roots of The Protocols’ fundamental myth: the Jew as God’s demonic opponent throughout history.

Noting that the same irrational hatred had been applied to witches and heretics in the medieval era, Cohn was struck by the continuing tradition of demonisation in modern times. In his book Europe’s Inner Demons (1976) he demonstrated the existence of an almost immutable complex of ideas that emerges again and again when societies in crisis seek scapegoats.

In 1993 Cohn published Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, in which he searched for the origins of humanity’s propensity for apocalyptic belief. “It is a response to change, especially disorientating change,” he told The Sunday Telegraph in 1996.

As the millennium approached, Cohn believed that the conditions existed for a worldwide rise in apocalyptic fervour. “Everything which our own society took for granted has been discredited,” he declared. “No loyalty or relationship has remained unquestioned, including that of the family. Many values have been inverted. And there is a pervasive sense of time speeding up, which is very characteristic of apocalypticism.”

From 1973 to 1980 Cohn was the Astor-Wolfson Professor of History at Sussex University; and he held various other academic appointments, several of them overseas. He was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and in 1978 was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

After retiring in 1980 he continued to write at his son’s 300-year-old thatched cottage in Hertfordshire; and he enjoyed long, vigorous country walks.

Norman Cohn married first, in 1941, Vera Broido, who died in 2004. He married secondly, in 2004, Marina Voikhanskaya, who survives him together with the son of his first marriage, the writer Nik Cohn.