Bøger udgivet af Common Notions

Work is a joke. Laughing at it is political.Humor, Groucho Marx asserted, is reason gone mad. For Walter Benjamin, laughter was the most revolutionary emotion. In a moment when great numbers of people are reevaluating their commitment to the hellscape we call work, what does it mean to take comedy seriouslyand to turn it against work?Both philosophically brilliant and deeply personal, Comedy Against Work demonstrates how laughing about work can puncture the pretensions of tyrannical bosses while uniting us around a commitment to radically new ways of making the world together. At the same time, Lane-McKinley exposes a war at the heart of contemporary comedy between those who see comedy as a weapon for punching down and those whose laughter points to social transformation. From stand-up to sitcoms, podcasts to late night, comedy reveals our longing to subvert power, escape the prison of work, and envision the joys of a liberated world.

A love letter to over 750 record labels which produced political music as a medium for improving our communities and world.

In the 1960s and '70s-when Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Delany, David Henderson, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Guillermo Morales, Adrienne Rich, and Assata Shakur all studied and taught at CUNY-New York City's classrooms and streets radiated as epicenters of Black, Puerto Rican, queer, and women's liberation.Conor Tomás Reed is part of the next generation of an insurgent CUNY movement nourished by these legacies. Highlighting the decolonial feminist metamorphosis that transformed our educational landscape, New York Liberation School explores how study and movement coalesced across classrooms and neighborhoods. Reed's immersive and wide-ranging narrative brings us into the archives and up close to the stories of its participants in order to reactivate these vibrant struggles. The result is a radiant reclamation of collective history that charts a vision for liberating education and society today.

In Stepford Daughters, Johanna Isaacson explores an emerging wave of horror films that get why class horror and gender horror must be understood together.In doing so, Isaacson makes the case that this often-maligned genre is in fact a place where oppressed people can understand, navigate and confront an increasingly ugly and horrifying world.Films like Hereditary and The Babadook show women coming apart at the seams as the promises of both the family and waged work fail them. In Get Out, we see how poor women and women of color perform the invisible labor that holds up our society, experiencing domestic work as a kind of possession. In coming of rage films such as Assassination Nation and Teeth, we see the ways social reproduction leads to a futureless horizon. Robbed of their dreams but not their power to resist, these heroines emerge as the monsters and avengers we need.

Joining a long line of speculative writing that helps us to understand worlds not yet existing An Oral History of the New York Commune will appeal to readers of Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ian M. Banks, Samuel Delaney, and China Mieville among others.

Explores the possibilities and challenges of becoming a comrade in an interconnected world of violence and oppression, showing how an understanding of oneself and others is an essential act of solidarity with struggles for decolonization and justice everywhere.

Drawing on the conceptual anchors of the Black Radical Tradition, How We Stay Free produces a Philly-driven literary mixtape/anthology-in-action

Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.Fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions. To do this, Jack Bratich asserts, we must dig deeper into the psyche and body that gives rise to fascist formations. There we will find microfascism, or the cultural ways in which a fascist understanding of the world is generated from the hatreds that suffuse everyday life.By highlighting the misogyny at fascisms core, we are able to observe a key process in the formation of a fascist body. Recognizing the microfascism behind appeals to recover the past glory of white male subjects created by earlier foundational wars, we see how histories of settler colonialism, genocide, and domination are animating the deadly mission of fascism today. By focusing on the variety of ways the resurgent fascist tendency courts its own destruction (and demands the destruction of others), we can trace how fascism refines and expands the death and annihilation that underpins capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems.On Microfascism are far-reaching and unsettling. Still, Bratich insists, the new fascism is not as powerful as its adherents wish us to believe. To defeat it, we must develop and defend a micro-antifascism grounded in the ethics of mutual aid and care in the everyday. Rooted in an understanding of how the fascist body is constructed, we can develop the collective power to dismember it.

In an uprising heard around the world, people in Argentina took to the streets on December 19th & 20th, 2001, shouting ';Que se vayan todos!' These words (All of them out!), and the thousands of people banging pots and pans, 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. Deeply involved in these movements were the activists who made up Colectivo Situaciones.With the embers of that December's aftermath still burning, Colectivo Situaciones militantly researched and wrote 19 and 20. Locating themselves among the ';horizontally organized subjectivities that insisted on not being represented by politicians but maintaining and developing their own powers of political expression' that Micheal Hardt notes in his introduction, Colectivo Situaciones gathers, interrogates, and offers forth the words of unemployed workers, factory occupiers, insurgent intellectuals, and children of the disappeared. From their investigations is revealed the birth of a new social protagonism and the de-institutional power (potencia) they wield.19 and 20 has been praised as this generation's 18th Brumaire and as Marx's analysis of that struggle helped set the stage for, twenty years later, the Paris Commune we find ourselves here. Revisiting and exploring the forms of counterpower that emerged from the shadow of neoliberal rule we find the book's potencia has only grown. In the intervening years the analysis of Colectivo Situaciones has been passed from hand to hand and multitudes of citizens from different countries have learned their own ways to chant Qu se vayan todos!, from Iceland to Tunisia, from Spain to Greece, from Tahrir Square to Black Lives Matter. Colectivo Situaciones' practice of militant research--of engaging with movements' own thought processes--resonates with everyone seeking to think current events and movements, and through that to gather the foundation of a commune for the 21st century.

We study revolutionary change not simply to understand it. We study revolution to make it.

A powerful guide to Indigenous liberation and the fight to save the planet. The Red Deal is both a manifesto for Indigenous liberation and a plan for the future of our planet. Part movement document and part activist handbook, its ultimate goal is not to heal the existing structures, but to present a way forward following the abolition of them.

';This country needs many more books like this one.'Arundhati Roy, author of Walking with the Comrades and The God of Small Things A powerful eyewitness account of life in an Indian prison shows how abolition is necessary to achieve a democratic transformation of society. In May 2007, Arun Ferreira, a democratic rights activist, was picked up at a railway station in western India, detained by the court, and condemned to prison for an expanding list of crimes: criminal conspiracy, murder, possession of arms, and rioting, among others added during his detention. In one of the most notorious prisons in India, Arun Ferreira was constantly abused and tortured. Over the next several years, each of the ten cases slapped against him fell apart. At long last, Ferreira was acquitted of all charges. As he exited the prison, moments away from freedom, he was rearrested by plainclothes police. He never got to glimpse his family waiting for him just outside the prison gates. In stark and riveting detail, Ferreira recounts the horrors he faced in prisontorture, beatings, the general air of hopelessnessand the small consolations that kept hope alivestrikes and solidarity among inmates. His memoir is a timely reminder that across the globe policing and incarceration are institutions in desperate need of being dismantled.

';How can we get free? How can we free ourselves, our communities, our environments, our society? Our present is infused with incredible possibilities for realizing a free association of social individuals, sustainably regulating our relations within nature. Yet the material possibilities for the realization of this freedom remain trapped within a present that summons all available weapons of repression to contain and suppress it';The question of freedom is central to all revolutionary movements. It is at the root of everyday struggles to resist and overcome oppression. Often, the realities we face constrain how we understand this question, so we ask it in pieces. How do we provide for each other? How do we protect, nurture, care, love, create? These questions of survival and perseverance ask how we liberate ourselves from the hardships of enclosure, exploitation, and dependency that are imposed on our minds, bodies, communities, and environments.'By laying bare the mechanisms of capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, climate catastrophe, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, exploitation and dispossesion, and a range of other oppressive structures and countering them with a historical account of revolutionary movements from around the world, Organizing for Autonomy offers a brazen and determined articulation of a world that centers community, love, and justice.With an unparalleled breadth and by synthesizing innumerable sources of revolutionary thought and history, CounterPower presents the result of years of inquiry, struggle, and resistance. Bold, fearless, and radically original, Organizing for Autonomy imagines a decolonized, communist, alternative world order that is free from oppressive structures, state violence, and racial capitalism and helps us to get there.

Take care of yourself. How many times a week do we hear or say these words? If we all took the time to care for ourselves, how much stronger will we be? More importantly how much stronger will our communities be? In Take Care of Your Self, Iraqi artist and curator Sundus Abdul Hadi turns a critical and inventive eye on the notion of self-care, rejecting the idea that self-care means buying stuff and recasting it as a collective practice rooted in the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Throughout, Abdul Hadi explores the role of art in fostering healing for those affected by racism, war, and displacement, weaving in the artwork of twenty-seven artists of color from diverse backgrounds to identify the points where these struggles intersect. In centering the voices of those often relegated to the margins of the art world and emphasizing the imperative to create safe spaces for artists of color to explore their complicated reactions to oppression, Abdul Hadi casts self-care as a political act rooted in the impulse toward self-determination, empowerment, and healing that animates the work of artists of color across the world.