There's a revolution going on in northern Syria, one that challenges everything we know about government and society and freedom. With centuries of ethnic oppression behind them, their backs against the embargo wall of Turkey, and the ruthless forces of the Islamic State laying siege to their cities, the people of Rojava are trying what might be the most ambitious social experiment of our times. Two-and-a-half million people are trying to live without a nationstate, using direct democracy to build a society ruled from the bottom up. As the Syrian civil war rages, the Kurds and other ethnic groups of Rojava fight for autonomy, feminism, ecological stewardship, cooperative economics, and ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism. It behooves us to understand their struggle as best we can. This book, compiling the words of militia members and academics alike, lays out the Rojava Revolution in plain language.

A new and exciting way to discover past lives through this branch of Celtic astrology.

The origins of the next radical economy is rooted in a tradition that has empowered people for centuries and is now making a comeback. A new feudalism is on the rise. While monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich, more and more of us are expected to live gig to gig. But, as Nathan Schneider shows, an alternative to the robber-baron economy is hiding in plain sight; we just need to know where to look. Cooperatives are jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprises that advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. They often emerge during moments of crisis not unlike our own, putting people in charge of the workplaces, credit unions, grocery stores, healthcare, and utilities they depend on. Everything for Everyone chronicles this revolution -- from taxi cooperatives keeping Uber at bay, to an outspoken mayor transforming his city in the Deep South, to a fugitive building a fairer version of Bitcoin, to the rural electric co-op members who are propelling an aging system into the future. As these pioneers show, co-ops are helping us rediscover our capacity for creative, powerful, and fair democracy.

What do we mean when we talk about “the State”? Multiple polls show a growing disillusionment with the State and representative government as vehicles for progressive change, and particularly as means to tame capitalism, let alone as a basis for seeing beyond it. In a quick and readable format, Eric Laursen proposes thinking about the State in an entirely new way—not simply as government or legal institutions, but as humanity’s analog to a computer operating system—opening up a new interpretation of the system of governance that emerged in Europe five-hundred years ago and now drives almost every aspect of human society. He also demonstrates powerfully why humanity’s life-and-death challenges—including racism, climate change, and rising economic exploitation—cannot be addressed as long as the State continues to exercise dominion.

Between Earth and Empire focuses on the crucial position of humanity at the present moment in Earth history. We are now in the midst of the Necrocene, an epoch of death and mass extinction. Nearing the end of the long history of Empire and domination, we are faced with the choice of either continuing the path of social and ecological disintegration or initiating a new era of social and ecological regeneration. The book shows that conventional approaches to global crisis on both the right and the left have succumbed to processes of denial and disavowal, either rejecting the reality of crisis entirely or substituting ineffectual but comforting gestures and images for deep, systemic social transformation. It is argued that a large-scale social and ecological regeneration must be rooted in communities of liberation and solidarity, fostering personal and group transformation so that a culture of awakening and care can emerge. Between Earth and Empire explores examples of significant progress in this direction, including the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, the Democratic Autonomy Movement in Rojava, indigenous movements in defense of the commons, the solidarity economy movement, and efforts to create liberated base communities and affinity groups within anarchism and other radical social movements. In the end, the book presents a vision of hope for social and ecological regeneration through the rebirth of a libertarian and communitarian social imaginary, and the flourishing of a free cooperative community globally.

Spatial Resistance: Literary and Digital Challenges to Neoliberalism utilizes various literary and digital artifacts to show the potential and possibility of changing the ways we consider the spaces we inhabit. As many spaces become increasingly privatized and policed, it is necessary to contemplate ways in which corporate and state-controlled spaces can not only be subverted but fundamentally changed to embrace the diverse lived experiences of all peoples. Through an analysis of fictional and virtual spaces, readers will be able to identify new ways to institute spatial change in everyday spatial lives in an effort to promote more democratic and equal experiences. While this book uses primarily the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to engender change, it also provides practical examples to amend, change, or update the actions to suit particular needs and spaces. This book shows that radical politics and the possibility of significant change can reside in just about any object or narrative; it is the responsibility of the individual to take up the task of creating social change premised on equality, liberty, and solidarity.

This edited collection analyses the unique characteristics of urban gardens, worker-owned coops, ecological communities, occupied factories and other social movements to demonstrate what we can learn from them in order to rethink our economies and societies.

Following decades of brutal campaigns against left forces, fascism in its nationalist and religious forms has been dominating Turkish, Iranian, and Arab politics for over half a century. At first, with key enemies vanquished, military generals assumed power and established some of the most terroristic totalitarian regimes in the 20th Century. It only followed that Islamist organizations then hijacked democratic movements of dissent. Now, in countries and territories where they have assumed state power, Islamist forces have surpassed all nationalist dictatorships for their utter disrespect of human lives. Today, Islamism subordinates peoples in the Middle East. Bearing the urgency of our times, Saladdin Bahozde problematizes all forms of fascist exclusionism in the region, while drawing attention to anti-fascist resistance and progressive alternatives there. As a critique of identitarianism and right-wing politics in the Middle East and North Africa, the work calls for a global movement, as endorsed by the peoples of the region, to go beyond nationalism and Islamism.

First Published in 1998. This is Volume XV of eighteen of a series on the Sociology of Public Policy, Welfare and Social Work. Written in 1948, this book highlights clearly the work that had been done by the voluntary social services in the period between the two wars, so as to make clearer the lines of demarcation between statutory and voluntary methods of providing for social needs. It was written with the hope that it would necessitate some radical reorganization in the post-war world.