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A counterculture history of art and experimental politics that turns the world inside out The Way Out examines the radical political and hedonist imaginaries of the experimental fringes of the UK Underground from 1961 to 1991 By examining the relations between collective and collaborative practices with an explicit agenda of cultural revolution, Kasper Opstrup charts a hidden history of experiments with cultural engineering, expanding current discussions of art, medias, politics, radical education and the occult revival. Even though the theatres of operation have changed with the rise of the Internet and a globalised finance economy, these imaginaries still raise questions that speak directly to the present. Here we encounter a series of figures – including Alexander Trocchi, R. D. Laing, Joseph Berke, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge – that blurred the lines between inner and outer, the invisible and the material. Four singular forms of speculative techniques for igniting an invisible insurrection with cultural means make up the central case studies: the sigma project, London Anti-University, Academy 23 and thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Contained within these imaginaries is a new type of action university: a communal affair that would improvise a new type of social relation into existence by de-programming and de-conditioning us without any blueprints for the future besides to make it happen. Instead of being turned upside down, the world was to be changed from the inside out. Bio: Kasper Opstrup is a writer and researcher of radical culture, specialising in concatenations of art/literature, radical politics, and occultism as counter-culture and underground phenomenon. Currently he is working on a book examining aesthetic undercurrents of mystical utopianism from surrealism to the contemporary tentatively called An Imaginary Kingdom in the Wastelands of the Real – on Art, Esotericism and the Politics of Hope.

The wave of political demonstrations since the Battle of Seattle in 2001 have crystallised a new trend in left-wing politics. Modern protest movements are grounding their actions in both Marxism and Anarchism, fighting for radical social change in terms that have nothing to do with the taking of state power. This is in clear opposition to the traditional Marxist theory of revolution which centres on the overthrow of government. In this book, John Holloway asks how we can reformulate our understanding of revolution as the struggle against power, not for power. After a century of failed attempts by revolutionary and reformist movements to bring about radical social change, the concept of revolution itself is in crisis. John Holloway opens up the theoretical debate, reposing some of the basic concepts of Marxism in a critical development of the subversive Marxist tradition represented by Adorno, Bloch and Lukacs, amongst others, and grounded in a rethinking of Marx's concept of 'fetishisation'-- how doing is transformed into being. John Holloway is a Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico. His publications include Crack Capitalism (Pluto, 2010), Change the World Without Taking Power (Pluto, 2005), Zapatista! Rethinking Revolution in Mexico(co-editor, Pluto, 1998) and Global Capital, National State and The Politics of Money (co-editor, 1994).

Our first book, published by the historic Charles H Kerr Publishing Company, presents the untold story of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. We chronicle the struggles of everyday people in the midst of the pandemic and argue that China’s rapid but fragile economic growth has created the social and biological conditions for new and deadly viruses, of which COVID-19 was merely the latest iteration. Through on-the-ground interviews, reports and analysis, Social Contagion offers a piercing portrait of the simultaneously draconian and ineffectual response of the Chinese state, as well as the self-organizing survival strategies of ordinary Chinese workers. We conclude that the pandemic has enabled a new mode of counterinsurgent governance, one rooted in decades of institutional experimentation and an emergent theory of statecraft.  Social Contagion and other material on microbiological class war in China includes an expanded and updated version of “Social Contagion,” our widely read article originally published on February 26, 2020, and collects interviews and translations with activists on the ground. The book concludes with a new, long-form article on the role that the pandemic played in China’s ongoing state-building project.

ln our second issue we turn our focus to the frontiers of crisis and capital in China. We expand our conceptual framework here, digging more deeply into some of our central theoretical concerns while also providing coherent narratives of historical events and contemporary faultlines. As always, we include interviews and translations alongside our own original work. This issue also contains, for the first time, two commissioned articles by authors outside of Chuǎng, each a regional specialist focusing on some portion of China’s borderlands.  We take these borders as our starting point. This issue therefore begins with the expanding frontier of capital itself, with our second long-form article on the economic history of China, “Red Dust: The Transition to Capitalism in China,” detailing the process by which the socialist developmental regime was dismantled and incorporated into the capitalist economy. We then move on to China’s literal frontiers, our two intakes exploring tensions in Xinjiang and Vietnam. Finally, we include a series of pieces exploring the frontiers of struggle and repression within Chinese industry.

Guy Debord was the most influential figure in the Situationist International, the subversive group that helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. His book The Society of the Spectacle, originally published in Paris in 1967, has been translated into more than twenty languages and is arguably the most important radical book of the twentieth century. This edition is a revised edition of the first English translation which was first published in 1970 by Black & Red in Detroit. Revised in 1977, this is a recent print run from 2018.

This is the first and best intellectual biography of Guy Debord, prime mover of the Situationist International (1957–1972) and author of The Society of the Spectacle, perhaps the seminal book of the May 1968 uprising in France. Anselm Jappe offers a powerful corrective to the continual attempts to incorporate Debord's theoretical work into “French theory.” Jappe's focus, to the contrary, is on Debord's debt to the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, to Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács, and more generally to left-Marxist currents of council communism. His close reading of Debord's magnum opus supplies a superb gloss that has never been rivaled despite the great flood of writing on the Situationists in recent decades. At the same time, Debord is placed squarely in context among the Letterist and Situationist anti-artists who, in the aftermath of World War II, sought to criticize and transcend the legacy of Dada and Surrealism. Jappe's book offers a lively account of the Situationists' theory and practice as this “last avant-garde” made its way from radical bohemianism to revolutionary theory and action. Guy Debord has been translated into many languages. This PM Press reprint edition benefits from a new author's preface and a bibliographical update. Praise: “A clear-headed account . . . far and away the best we have so far.” —Times Literary Supplement “The only book on Debord in either French or English that can be unreservedly recommended . . . particularly useful for its extensive treatment of the Marxian connection that is usually ignored in culture-oriented accounts of the Situationists.” —Ken Knabb, editor of Situationist International Anthology “Jappe successfully gets to grips with the content of Debord's and the SI's activity in a way that is accessible and doesn't require a vast amount of prior knowledge or an extensive vocabulary of obscure jargon in order to understand it. Debord has got a somewhat undeserved reputation for having an impenetrable and complex writing style—a myth which Jappe goes a long way towards refuting by examining the major concepts in Society of the Spectacle and other works, and putting them in the context of a wider historical basis and in terms of the SI as a whole.” —Do or Die “Political writing is always instrumental as well as utopian. Debord's is no exception. Only sometimes writing has to reconcile itself to the idea that its time of instrumentality—its time as a weapon—lies a little in the future. Jappe's book is true to its subject, above all, because it reads Debord, and helps us read him, with that future in mind.” —T.J. Clark, from the Foreword

Revisiting the events of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which some 25,000 Polish prisoners of war were shot by the Soviet secret police on Stalin's orders, Victor Zaslavsky explores a paradigmatic and terrifying example of the policy of class cleansing practiced in the Soviet Union and its occupied territories during World War II. By blaming the Katyn Massacre on the Nazis, the Soviets constructed one of the greatest historiographical falsifications of the twentieth century. Based on secret documents of the Soviet regime that became available only after its collapse, Zaslavsky unearths the methods used to create and maintain the Soviet "official version" of what happened at Katyn, a process involving the complicity of Western governments and left-leaning historians, which resulted in the upholding of this falsification until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Theses on the Situationist International, from two of its leading lights - Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti - along with some appendices. This edition published by Chronos Publications, 1990.BACK IN STOCK!

Guy Debord (1931-94) was one of the most important and intriguing intellectual figures of the twentieth century.Filmmaker and poet, urban critic and political theorist, adventurer and activist extraordinaire during Paris' May 1968 uprisings, Debord was simultaneously behind and ahead of his times. Best-known as guru of the avant-garde revolutionary movement the Situationist International (1957-72), and for a classic indictment of post-war capitalist consumerism The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord's life and work remains fascinating to this day. Yet the man himself remained elusive and enigmatic throughout his life. Master urban tactician in the 1950s, political muckraker, organizer and theorist during the 1960s, vagabond throughout the 1970s, fleeing to Spain and Italy, he lived as a recluse during the 1980s and early 1990s in an isolated farmhouse in Champot (Auvergne), behind a high stone wall. Guy Debord crosses over that Champot wall, pushes back Debord's shutters and peers through his windows. It crosses his threshold, drinks his wine, and listens to him talk. Andrew Merrifield focuses on the particulars of Debord's life, shedding light on this admirable yet apparently impenetrable figure, a free spirit who was radically at odds with life but at the same time loved many things in it, and thought them worth fighting for. The book reveals the dynamics of the man, his ideas, and his times which have much to say to our own, equally troubled times. The ideas of Guy Debord, who died only 10 years ago, continue to expose the fragility of our democracy and the mismatch between people and political power today; this book shows that the lessons of Debord are as fresh, subversive, and relevant now as they were forty years ago.

Guy Debord: Panegyric, Verso 1991, ISBN 0-86091-559-X“I have written less than most writers. But I have drunk far more than most drinkers.” “All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have joined in these troubles.” “My method will be very simple. I will tell of what I have loved; and, in this light, everything else will become evident … ” “Over the years, more than half the people I knew well had sojourned one or several times in the prisons of various countries; many, no doubt, for political reasons, but all the same a greater number for common law offenses or crimes. So I met mainly rebels or the poor.” Guy Debord’s silver-tongue-in-cheek autobiography mixes precision and pastiche in a whirlwind account of philosophy, exploit, and inebriation. From the stark professions of Volume I to the illustrated sequences of Volume 2, Panegyric confronts us with a figure who strategically, demonically tried to wrest life from the disabling modern “spectacle.” “These concise but extremely rich and provocative memoirs are the product of … philosopher whose scathing pen has never been so sharp.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A brief and elegiac memoir of a life lived in its shadows and cracks.” —Artforum “As cryptic and self-effacing a self-portrait as can be found anywhere & Panegyric is almost purely literary, in the sense that one need know or care nothing of the author to be captured by it: Debord is seeking to hijack his era into timelessness.” — London Review of Books Guy Debord was born in 1931 was born in 1931. A founding member of the Letterist International and the Situationist International, he was the editor of their key journals, Potlach and Internationale Situationiste. He committed suicide in 1994. His written and film works include The Society of the Spectacle.

“Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse.” —Michael Löwy First published in 1967, Guy Debord’s stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord’s pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today’s age of satellite television and the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published twenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previous analysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in a period when the “integrated spectacle” was dominant. Resolutely refusing to be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through the dogma and mystification offered by journalists and pundits to show how aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, the Mafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacular society. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logic of domination, Debord’s Comments convey the revolutionary impulse at the heart of situationism. (from the Verso website).Guy Debord: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. In the Verso series "Radical Thinkers" 1998. ISBN 978-1-84467-672-9

(Active Distro info:) A down-and-dirty survey of the Surrealist movement written under a psuedonym in 1970 by leading Situationist theorist Raoul Vaneigem. Intended for a high-school readership, and dashed off in two weeks, Vaneigem's sketch bars no holds: disrespectful in the extreme, blistering on Surrealism's artistic and political aporias, and packed with telling quotations, it also gives respect where respect is due. Locating Surrealism's 'original sin'in its ideological nature, Vaneigem clearly identifies the 'radioactive fragment of radicalism' that the movement never managed completely to shed. If you want an unequivocal answer to the question, 'What was living and what was dead in Surrealism?', look no further. and for readers interested in the Situationists, this short book sheds a great deal of light on their attitudes, negative and positive, towards their Surrealist predecessors.

Guy Debord (1931-1994) was the leading light in the Situationist International. He and the group were the first to criticize and comment on the role of the consumer in Western society. If Dada was an artistic movement that somehow pushed its artistic values into the political arena, then the Situationists were political and urban theorists who transformed politics into an art form. Debord’s masterpiece "Society of the Spectacle" is a stunning and witty critique on contemporary society where the workweek and consumerism alienate the individual. "Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici" is a book-length rant and a confrontational stance against the French media with regards to the murder of his good friend and financial supporter Gerard Lebovici. In 1984 Lebovici was called away from an appointment and three days later the police found his body behind the steering wheel of his Renault with four bullet wounds to the back of his head, in a vacant parking lot in Paris. Lebovici was an inventive businessman, movie producer, publisher, and a major financial supporter of Situationist activity -including ownership of a movie theater that screened the films of Debord and other Situationists. It's suspected that gangsters killed Lebovici, although to this day the murderer(s) have never been found. That didn't stop certain groups in the media connecting Lebovici's death with the Situationists. In this passionate rebuttal, Debord lashes out with great humor and intensity against the media and defends his good friend Gerard Lebovici. This book should not be seen as an account of an isolated, almost forgotten murder case, but as a general call-to-arms with respect to how the media controls and rewrites its ‘facts’.

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, Southern 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 Discontentstreats Communization as a problem to be explored rather than a solution. Taking in the new theorisations 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.Contributors include: Alberto Toscano, Nicole Pepperell, Anthony Iles, Marina Vishmidt, Evan Calder Williams, Jason E Smith, Théorie Communiste, Endnotes, Jasper Bernes, John Cunningham, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Alexander Galloway.BACK IN STOCK!

New re-edition of Peter Sedgwick's Psycho Politics from the original publisher - with a new introduction.Publisher info: 'A powerful and impassioned defence of psychiatry, urging the Left to confront the harsh realities of mental illness’ – William Davis, author of The Happiness Industry A new edition of one of the most significant and credible critiques of the anti-psychiatry movement. As relevant today as it was when first published in 1982, the book changed the conversation on mental health and illness, demanding that we assess its relationship to the wider decay of social institutions. Dissecting the work of popular anti-psychiatric thinkers, Erving Goffman, R.D. Laing, Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, Sedgwick exposed the conservative undercurrents and false hopes represented by the alternative psychiatry of the sixties and seventies, challenging the very real impact it had on our collective responsibility to look after the mentally ill.With a new introduction that highlights the relevance of Sedgwick’s demands for modern mental health movements, the practice of psychiatry and for left-wing activists, this new edition further cements PsychoPolitics’ cult classic status.

William S. Burroughs: The Ticket That Exploded, ISBN 0-8021-5150-7, Grove Press edition 1987. Classic William S. Burroughs cut-up novel!BACK IN STOCK!

Dave & Stuart Wise: Like a Summer With a Thousand Julys. Collected writings from Dave and Stuart Wise 1978-2008 ISBN 978-0993475719BACK IN STOCK!

Although the Vietnam War is still well known, few people are aware of the decades of struggles against the French colonial regime that preceded it, many of which had no connection with the Stalinists (Ho Chi Minh's Communist Party). The Stalinists were ultimately victorious, but only because they systematically destroyed all the other oppositional currents.This book is the story of those other movements and revolts, caught in the crossfire between the French and the Stalinists, told by one of the few survivors. Author Ngo Van's In the Crossfire is one of those rare books like Voline's The Unknown Revolution or Orwell's Homage to Catalonia that almost singlehandedly unveils moments of hidden history - sublime moments when people break through the bounds of the "possible" and strive to create a life worthy of their deepest dreams and aspirations. In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary is an English translation of Ngo Van's fascinating and gripping autobiography, originally published in two volumes in France in 2000 and 2005. Co-edited by Van's close friend and collaborator, Hélène Fleury, and acclaimed situationist author and translator Ken Knabb, the book includes seventy color and black and white illustrations, reproducing many of Van's paintings as well as numerous documentary photographs. In the Crossfire belongs on the shelf of every serious scholar of Vietnamese history, and is sure to be a compelling read for anyone interested in the revolutionary history of the twentieth century and beyond.Ngo Van was born in a peasant village in Vietnam in 1912. As a young man he moved to Saigon and became involved in underground struggles against the French colonial regime. In the aftermath of World War II, as most of his comrades were being murdered by Ho Chi Minh's Communist Party, Van escaped to France, where he became a factory worker, a painter, and a historical scholar. Following his retirement in 1978, he devoted the remainder of his life to researching and writing a series of books on the history of modern Vietnam. He died in 2005 at the age of 92. Edited by Ken Knabb and Helene Fleury, published by AK Press, 2010. Product Code: 9781849350136Back in Stock! Strongly recommended! 

Grandizio Munis, Benjamin Péret, Natalia Sedova-Trotsky: The Fourth Internatonal in Danger! Selected Documents 1944-1948A collection of documents critical of the official course the 4th International was taking in the mid-40s, written by Munis, Péret and Trotsky's widow Sedova-Trotsky.This compilation is undated, but probably from the late 70s (?)

Since the modern anti-globalisation movement kicked off with the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, a new generation has been engaging in anti-capitalist direct action. Its aims, politics, lifestyles and tactics grow directly out of the autonomous social movements that emerged in Europe from the 1970s through to the mid-1990s. However, today's infamous 'Black Blocs' are the direct descendants of the European 'Autonomen' - but these important historical connections are rarely noted, and never understood. Subversion of Politics sets the record straight, filling the gaps between the momentous events of 1968 and 1999. Katsiaficas presents the protagonists of social revolt - Italian feminists, squatters, disarmament and anti-nuclear activists, punk rockers, and anti-fascist street fighters - in a compelling and sympathetic light. At the same time, he offers a work of great critical depth, drawing from these political practices a new theory of freedom and autonomy that redefines the parameters of the political itself. George Katsiaficas. AK Press, 2006. This is an updated AK Press edition which contains a new introduction by the author. "This book is an important corrective to the all-too-common view that global capitalism is triumphant, that there is no basis for opposing the values that it promotes" - Babara Epstein, University of California. "...a unique history of autonomists in Italy, Germany and other parts of Europe from the 1970s on.....It is a good place to think and re-think the anti-party politics of the future." - George Caffentzis, Midnight Notes Collective.Product Code: 9781904859536

The most systematic exposition of Bifo's philosophy to date.  We live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem to be incapable of producing that radical change that is so desperately needed. Is there still a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination? In his most systematic book to date, renowned Italian theorist Franco Berardi Bifo tackles this question through a solid yet visionary analysis of the three fundamental concepts of Possibility, Potency, and Power. Overcoming any temptation of giving in to despair or nostalgia, Berardi proposes the notion of Futurability as a way to remind us that even within the darkness of our current crisis, still lies dormant the horizon of possibility.

Why should radicals be interested in playing wargames? Surely the Left can have no interest in such militarist fantasies? Yet, Guy Debord – the leader of the Situationist International – placed such importance on his invention of The Game of War described it as his most significant of his accomplishment. Intrigued by this claim, a multinational group of artists, activists and academics formed Class Wargames to investigate the political and strategic lessons that could be learnt from playing his ludic experiment. While the ideas of the Situationists continue to be highly influential in the development of subversive art and politics, relatively little attention has been paid to their strategic orientation. Determined to correct this deficiency, Class Wargames is committed to exploring how Debord used the metaphor of the Napoleonic battlefield to propagate a Situationist analysis of modern culture and politics. Inspired by his example its members have also hacked other military simulations: H.G. Wells’ Little Wars; Chris Peers’ Reds versus Reds and Richard Borg’s Commands & Colors. Playing wargames is not a diversion from politics: it is the training ground of tomorrow’s communist insurgents. Fusing together historical research on avant-garde artists, political revolutionaries and military theorists with narratives of five years of public performances, Class Wargames provides a strategic and tactical manual for subverting the economic, political and ideological hierarchies of early-21st century neoliberal capitalism. The knowledge required to create a truly human civilisation is there to be discovered on the game board! “In a world become ‘game-ified’ against its will, Class Wargames provides the field manual for the only game that matters – that of history.” – McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street and Gamer Theory. “Richard Barbrook’s approach to the Situationist International is so left field, he leaves virtually every other author addressing the subject looking like a dull academic plodder. Were he still alive, Barbrook’s fellow iconoclast Guy Debord would heartily approve of such unacceptable theory.” – Stewart Home, Stewart Home, avant-garde pornographer and Paul Hamlyn Foundation prize winner “Richard Barbrook’s book is a jubilant manifesto for ludic art and revolution – each in service of the other – for a participatory future. By bringing Situationist disciplines into a contemporary context, he shows how thinkers, gamers, artists, hackers and educators can resist assimilation, and their creative endeavours escape perversion, by the deadly, dominating forces of neoliberalism.” – Ruth Catlow, co-founder of Furtherfield and creator of Rethinking Wargames Bio: Richard Barbrook is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Westminster and an active member of Class Wargames. He is the author of Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, The Class of the New, and Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity

“The project: to rescue ‘communism’ from its own disrepute. Once invoked as the liberation of work through mankind’s collective creation, communism has instead stifled humanity. We who see in communism the liberation of both collective and individual possibilities must reverse that regimentation of thought and desire which terminates the individual….”  Thus begins the extraordinary collaboration between Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, written at dawn of the 1980s, in the wake of the crushing of the autonomous movements of the previous decade. Setting out Guattari and Negri diagnose with incisive prescience transformations of the global economy and theorize new forms of alliance and organization: mutant machines of subjectivation and social movement.Prefiguring his collaboration with Michael Hardt, Negri and Guattari enact a singular hybridization of political and philosophical traditions, brining together psychiatry, political analysis, semiotics, aesthetics, and philosophy. Against the workings of an increasingly integrated world capitalism, they raise the banners of singularity, autonomy, and freedom to search out new routes for subversion.This newly expanded edition includes previously untranslated materials and a new introduction by Matteo Mandarini.“After the highpoint of the subversive decade 1968-1977, Italian autonomist Marxism and French theory of desire meet at the intersection of two different methodologies of subjectivation. Social recomposition of the working class and molecular proliferation of desire merge, and together open a new space for theory and for social action. While the ideologies of the twentieth century are falling, Toni Negri and Félix Guattari trace the lines of a new vision of autonomy.” – Franco ‘Bifo’ BerardiBACK IN STOCK!

"Explores the work of artists' groups in New York City after 1968. From the Art Workers' Coalition through Art & Language, Colab and Group Material in the 1980s, in Soho and the Lower East Side, these collectives built the post-modern artworld. This is the key background story of today's politicized international artworld with its constellations of collectives, a scholarly text written in an accessible style." Alan W. Moore. Autonomedia, 2011. ISBN 978-1-57027-237-0BACK IN STOCK!