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Film and the Anarchist Imagination by Richard Porton. London. 1999. Verso. 1859847021. 320 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Bearded bomb-throwers, self-indulgent nihilists, dangerous subversives-these characteristic cliches of anarchists in the popular imagination are often reproduced in the cinema. In Film and the Anarchist Imagination, the first comprehensive survey of anarchism in film, Richard Porton deconstructs such stereotypes while offering an authoritative account of films featuring anarchist characters and motifs. From the early cinema of Griffith and Rene Clair, to the work of Godard, Lina Wertmuller, Lizzie Borden and Ken Loach, Porton analyzes portrayals of anarchism in film, presenting commentaries and critiques of such classics as Zero de Conduite, Vivre sa Vie, and Love and Anarchy. In addition, he provides an excellent guide to the complex traditions of anarchist thought, from Bakunin and Kropotkin to Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin, disclosing a rich historical legacy that encompasses the Paris Commune, the Haymarket martyrs, the anarcho-syndicalists of the Spanish Civil War, as well as more familiar contemporary avatars like the Situationists and the enrages of May 68. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Porton is one of Cineaste magazine's editors and has written on film for Cinema Scope, The Daily Beast, and Sight & Sound.

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Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin. New York. 1939. Pioneer Publishers. Translated from the French by Frances and Mason Merrill. Introduction by Dwight Macdonald. 339 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - Fascism and Big Business, written in 1936 before the Second World War broke out, examines the development of nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy and its relationship with the capitalist families there. Its main thesis is that Fascism supported the heavy industrial sector (represented in Germany by Krupp, Emil Kirdorf, etc.) to the detriment of lighter industrial sectors, dedicated to building consumer goods. It points out the failure of "corporatism," which in effect meant the dismantling of trade unions and worker's inability to elect their own representatives, who were nominated instead by the fascists.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Guerin (19 May 1904 in Paris - 14 April 1988 in Suresnes) was a French anarcho-communist author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the mid-19th century through the first half of the 20th century. He is also known for his opposition to Nazism, fascism and colonialism, in addition to his support for the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War, and his revolutionary defence of free love and homosexuality.

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Anarchism by Daniel Guerin. New York. 1970. Monthly Review Press. Introduction by Noam Chomsky. Translated from the French by Mary Klopper. 166 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Martin Stephen Moskof Associates, Inc.

DESCRIPTION - Daniel Guerin, one of the ablest writers of the French Left, has brought to bear his extraordinary talents and his four decades of socialist scholarship in this absorbing and authoritative account of the history and theory of anarchism. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Guerin (19 May 1904 in Paris - 14 April 1988 in Suresnes) was a French anarcho-communist author, best known for his work Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, as well as his collection No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism in which he collected writings on the idea and movement it inspired, from the first writings of Max Stirner in the mid-19th century through the first half of the 20th century. He is also known for his opposition to Nazism, fascism and colonialism, in addition to his support for the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the Spanish Civil War, and his revolutionary defence of free love and homosexuality.

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The Ancient Lowly - 2 volumes by C. Osborne Ward. Chicago. 1888-1900. Charles H. Kerr & Company. volume 1 - 597 pages; volume 716 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - FROM THE ANCIENT LOWLY - The great strikes and uprisings of the working people of the ancient world are almost unknown to the living age. It matters little how accounts of five immense strike-wars, involving destruction of property and mutual slaughter of millions of people, have been suppressed, or have otherwise failed to reach us; the fact remains that people are absolutely ignorant of these great events. A meagre sketch of Spartacus may be seen in the encyclopedias, but it is always ruined and its interest pinched and blighted by being classed with crime, its heroes with criminals, its theme with desecration. Yet Spartacus was one of the great generals of history; fully equal to Hannibal and Napoleon, while his cause was much more just and infinitely nobler, his life a model of the beautiful and virtuous, his death an episode of surpassing grandeur. Still more strange is it, that the great ten-years' war of Eunus should be unknown. He marshalled at one time an army of two hundred thousand soldiers. He manœuvered them and fought for ten full years for liberty, defeating army after army of Rome. Why is the world ignorant of this fierce, epochal rebellion? Almost the whole matter is passed over in silence by our histories of Rome. In these pages it will be read as news, yet should a similar war rage in our day, against a similar condition of slavery, its cause would not only be considered just, but the combatants would have the sympathy and support of the civilized world. The great system of labor organization explained in these pages must likewise be regarded as a chapter of news. The portentous fact has lain in abeyance century after century, with the human family in profound ignorance of an organization of trades and other labor unions so powerful that for hundreds of years they undertook and successfully conducted the business of manufacture, of distribution, of purveying provisions to armies, of feeding the inhabitants of the largest cities in the world, of inventing, supplying and working the huge engines of war, and of collecting customs and taxes - tasks confided to their care by the state. Our civilization has a blushingly poor excuse for its profound ignorance of these facts; for the evidences have existed from much before the beginning of our era.… They are growing fewer and dimmer as their value rises higher in the estimation of a thinking, appreciative, gradually awakening world

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyrenus Osborne Ward (October 28, 1831 - March 19, 1902) was a historian and author of The Ancient Lowly (1887), the book that looked at ancient history from a working-class perspective. Raised to work on his parents’ Illinois farm, he left home in 1848 when he was seventeen. He travelled, earning his keep in manual trades and as a violinist. He read voraciously in history and geology and taught himself ancient and modern languages. He was rejected for service in the Civil War, and became involved with organised labour in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. His political writings brought him to the attention of international socialists;  the archive holding Ward’s papers in New York Public Library contains his membership card in the International Workingman’s Association, dated 1870 and signed by Karl Marx.Cyrenus Osborne Ward (October 28, 1831 - March 19, 1902) was a historian and author of The Ancient Lowly (1887), the book that looked at ancient history from a working-class perspective. Raised to work on his parents’ Illinois farm, he left home in 1848 when he was seventeen. He travelled, earning his keep in manual trades and as a violinist. He read voraciously in history and geology and taught himself ancient and modern languages. He was rejected for service in the Civil War, and became involved with organised labour in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. His political writings brought him to the attention of international socialists;  the archive holding Ward’s papers in New York Public Library contains his membership card in the International Workingman’s Association, dated 1870 and signed by Karl Marx.Ward was an active organizer and contributor to American socialist politics in the 19th century. He served on the Council of the First International at the The Hague Congress (1872) and worked in Marxist politics in Europe and the United States for much of the late nineteenth century. He worked as a librarian and translator for the US Bureau of Labor during the writing of his great work, under the title A History of the Ancient Working People and The Ancient Lowly to the Adoption of Christianity by Constantine.

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Eurocentrism by Samir Amin. New York. 1989. Monthly Review Press. hardcover. 152 pages. Translated from the French by Russell More. 0853457867.

DESCRIPTION -  Since its first publication twenty years ago, Eurocentrism has become a classic of radical thought. Written by one of the world's foremost political economists, this original and provocative essay takes on one of the great 'ideological deformations' of our time: Eurocentrism. Rejecting the dominant Eurocentric view of world history, which narrowly and incorrectly posits a progression from the Greek and Roman classical world to Christian feudalism and the European capitalist system, Amin presents a sweeping reinterpretation that emphasizes the crucial historical role played by the Arab Islamic world. Throughout the work, Amin addresses a broad set of concerns, ranging from the ideological nature of scholastic metaphysics to the meanings and shortcomings of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism.

Samir Amin was born in Cairo, the son of two doctors, his father Egyptian and his mother French. He lived in Port Said in northern Egypt and attended the French lycée there, receiving his baccalaureate in 1947. Amin then enrolled at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris to study mathematics and at the Institut d’études Politiques to study law, which at the time was the way to study economics. He received a diploma in political science in 1952 and a license in law and economics in 1953 and then opted to pursue a doctorate in economics. He also obtained a diploma in statistics from the Institut de Statistiques de L’université de Paris in 1956. In June 1957, Amin received a doctorate in economics under the direction of Maurice Byé and with the additional guidance of François Perroux. As a student, Amin spent much of his time as a militant with various student movements and from 1949 to 1953 helped publish the journal Étudiants Anticolonialistes, through which he met many of the future members of Africa’s governing elite. From 1957 to 1960, Amin worked in Cairo on economic development issues for the Egyptian government, then moved to Bamako, Mali, where he was an adviser to the Malian planning ministry (1960-1963). In 1963 he moved to Dakar, Senegal, where he took a fellowship (1963-1970) at the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP). He became a director at IDEP (1970-1980) and subsequently was named director of the Third World Forum (1980–). Amin has at various times held professorships in Poitiers, Dakar, and Paris. The author of more than thirty books, Amin’s brilliant 1957 dissertation, subsequently published in 1970 as L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale; critique de la théorie dusous-développement (translated in 1974 as Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment ), was the earliest significant work to argue that underdevel-opment in much of the world was a direct consequence of the way the capitalist economy functions. He argued that this polarization is due to transfers of profits from the poor countries to the rich, which help alleviate potential under-consumptionist problems in the industrial economies, allowing the industrial world to pay higher salaries or offer lower prices to consumers than would be possible were the labor theory of value to work simply at the national level. Amin’s new emphasis on the global economy as a unit of analysis is intended to explain global salary and price differences within a Marxist labor theory of value. Even his later works (e.g. Obsolescent Capitalism and Beyond U.S. Hegemony ) have built on this model to critique imperialist projects generally and post–September 11, 2001 U.S. hegemonic efforts more particularly. Amin argues for a polycentric world that can counteract monopolies in areas such as technology, finance, natural resources, media, and weapons production that consistently hurt poor countries. Amin’s reliance on a labor theory of value and underconsumptionist theory has limited his analytical outlook and led him to make overly simplistic predictions even as it has allowed a holistic historical materialistic perspective. Nevertheless, his criticisms of neoclassical equilibrium models and imperialistic projects have long since been joined by those of economists and social scientists from many different theoretical persuasions. 

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Cold War on Five Continents:A Global History of Empire and Espionage by Alfred W. McCoy. Chicago. 2025. Haymarket Books. 9798888905029. 591 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A provocative analysis of the deadly Cold War conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington. Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable hellscapes, the surrogate wars of the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that have persisted into the present. In this ambitious work, Alfred W. McCoy uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to offer an unexpected new perspective on the longest, most consequential conflict in modern history. McCoy renders an intimate portrait of both embattled covert operatives and committed antiwar protesters, thus humanizing the history of the Cold War—a history that has too often been told in impersonal terms of economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes. As today’s great powers devote humanity’s scarce resources toward ratcheting up a “new cold war” in the face of a worsening climate crisis, McCoy’s history is an important reminder that otherwise- ordinary individuals once helped end a global conflict that threatened nuclear holocaust.

 Alfred W. McCoy is professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Educated at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale, he has spent the past twenty years writing about the politics and history of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books on the Philippines, one of which won the country's National Book Award, and the editor of Southeast Asia Under Japanese Occupation. An internationally recognized expert on drug trafficking and organized crime, he is also the author of DRUG TRAFFIC: NARCOTICS AND ORGANIZED CRIME IN AUSTRALIA.

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Peddlers of Hate: How the Ku Klux Klan Seized Power in 1920s Oregon by Steve Law. Corvallis. 2026. Oregon State University Press. 9781962645706. 278 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - The revived Knights of the Ku Klux Klan flourished in Oregon in the early 1920s. With more than sixty chapters established in both large and small communities like Portland, Medford, Astoria, and La Grande, the Klan’s power escalated in the region. Klan salesmen, working on commission, successfully enlisted Oregonians with a message of religious prejudice and racism. At the Klan’s peak, Portland was home to the sixth largest chapter in the country and there were more members per capita in Oregon than in any other state except one. In Peddlers of Hate, journalist Steve Law draws on published and unpublished sources, new research, and interviews with leading scholars to provide a comprehensive account of how Oregon became one of the Klan’s strongest outposts. Representing the Klan as merely a fraternal lodge, Klan recruiters were trained to vilify Catholics, immigrants, Blacks, and Jews. They gained wide support, toppling an incumbent governor and congressman, persuading voters to ban Catholic schools, and winning control of the legislature and several local governments. From stories of “escaped nuns” to fiery crosses at mass Klan rallies at Salem’s state fairgrounds and Portland’s Mount Tabor Park, Law examines this divisive and forgotten time in Oregon’s history. He shows how it was finally greed, hypocrisy, and corruption that spurred the hate group’s demise―providing historical lessons that will resonate today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steve Law is a retired Oregon newspaper reporter and editor. He and his wife live in Portland, Oregon.

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On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky. London. 2014. Penguin Books. 9780241969601. 170 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - On Anarchism sheds a much needed light on the foundations of Chomsky's thought, specifically his constant questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. The book gathers his essays and interviews to provide a short, accessible introduction to his distinctively optimistic brand of anarchism. Refuting the notion of anarchism as a fixed idea, and disputing the traditional fault lines between anarchism and socialism, this is a book sure to challenge, provoke and inspire. Profoundly relevant to our times, it is a touchstone for political activists and anyone interested in deepening their understanding of anarchism, or of Chomsky's thought.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. Between 1980 and 1992, Chomsky was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar, and eighth overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the ‘world's top public intellectual' in a 2005 poll. Chomsky has also been described as the ‘father of modern linguistics' and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, logic, mathematics, music theory and analysis, political science, programming language theory and psychology. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem. After the publication of his first books on linguistics, Chomsky became a prominent critic of the Vietnam War and has since continued to publish books of political criticism. He has become well known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy, state capitalism and the mainstream news media. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media. He describes his views as ‘fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism,' and often identifies with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

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The World of Odysseus by M. I. Finley. New York. 1978. Viking Press. 0670787647. 192 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - Are the Iliad and the Odyssey just charming poetic fantasies? Or do they give a more or less accurate picture of the Mycenaean period, the early Dark Age or Homer's own era? Do archaeological discoveries like Schliemann's excavations at Troy bear out Homer's account of the Trojan War? The World of Odysseus is a concise and penetrating account of the society that gave birth to the Iliad and the Odyssey--a book that provides a vivid picture of the Greek Dark Ages, its men and women, works and days, morals and values. Long celebrated as a pathbreaking achievement in the social history of the ancient world, M.I. Finley's brilliant study remains, as classicist Bernard Knox notes, "as indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader"--a fundamental companion for students of Homer and Homeric Greece.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Moses I. Finley (May 20, 1912–June 23, 1986) was an American professor, whose prosecution by the McCarran Security Committee led to his move to England, where he became English classical scholar and eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge. His most notable work is The Ancient Economy (1973), where he argued that status and civic ideology governed the economy in antiquity rather than rational economic motivations.

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The Authoress of the Odyssey by Samuel Butler. Chicago. 1967. Phoenix Books/University of Chicago Press. Introduction by David Grene. A Phoenix Book published by The University of Chicago Press. 277 pages. paperback. Cover Design by Sidney Pivecka.

DESCRIPTION - In this heterodox but serious study of the Odyssey, originally published in 1897, Butler argues that the epic was not only written more than two centuries later than the Iliad, but that the author was a woman, a young Sicilian lady of Trapani. With great insight - and sometimes with whimsical humor - Butler examines the poem not only as a classical scholar but also as a fellow artist. His ‘proof' that much of the Odyssey could only have been written by a woman will convince many modern readers, if it did not some of his contemporaries. David Grene, in a new Introduction to the book, writes: ‘Butler's commonsense has a special sturdiness. It stands up. It occasionally approaches philistinism; but it never dissolves into verbal trickery and human falsity when we look closer. And in this strangest of books of classical scholarship and criticism, the paradoxical approach, whether you accept Butler's conclusions or not, makes you look at real things in the poem.' 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Butler (December 4, 1835, Langar, Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom - June 18, 1902, London, United Kingdom) was an English satirist with an interest in music, biology, literature, and art, as well as classical scholarship. Among his other books are Erewhon, Erewhon Revisited, and The Way of All Flesh.

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