Alex Prichard - Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red

Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red is an invaluable contribution to historical scholarship and libertarian politics. The collection of essays contained in the book has the great virtue of offering both analytical perspectives on ideas, and historical perspectives on movements. The contributions examine classical themes in anarchist politics such as individual liberty, whilst also exploring more neglected thinkers and themes from a libertarian standpoint, such as C.L.R. James and race. There can be little doubt that the volume will be of major interest to historians, theorists, students and activists.

Darrow Schecter, reader in Italian, School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex

This is a welcome and essential collection that is sure to spark debates and support ongoing efforts to build a liberatory movement in which Marxists and anarchists can find common ground and practice mutual respect and humility. In this period of late-capitalism, survival itself is at stake. Theory and practice, whether Marxism or Anarchism in their many manifestations, lead to dead ends without careful assessment of the world as it is now.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States

An important, redemptive collection of essays that questions narratives of sectarian difference without resorting to easy answers. In exploring the productive frictions, convergences, agonisms and affinities that have created and re-created the black and red, the contributors recover the neglected histories of a capacious Left, one that repudiated ideological rigidity and sterile orthodoxies without abandoning its socialist commons. Itself a model of such capaciousness, this is a stimulating and necessary work.

Raymond B. Craib, associate professor, Department of History, Cornell University

Just what we need as we move into a new phase of revolt against the obscenity of capitalism: a recovery of the richness of our different traditions of struggle, with their weavings and bumpings. Time to move on, time to redeem the struggles of the past. A valuable and welcome collection.

John Holloway, author of Change the World Without Taking Power and professor of sociology, Autonomous University of Puebla

Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red

Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta, and David Berry 2017

This edition 2017 PM Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-390-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959590

Cover by John Yates/Stealworks.com

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PM Press

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Oakland, CA 94623

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Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard

Paul Blackledge

Ruth Kinna

Lewis H. Mates

Renzo Llorente

Carl Levy

Saku Pinta

Christian Hgsbjerg

Andrew Cornell

David Berry

Benot Challand

Jean-Christophe Angaut

Toby Boraman

David Bates

Saku Pinta and David Berry

We would like to thank our contributors to the volume for their patience and for responding so positively to editorial requests. We gratefully acknowledge the support of everyone at PM Press, who have enabled us to bring out this expanded, accessible edition of the book. We would also like to thank all the participants at the Is Black and Red Dead? conference held at the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice, University of Nottingham, UK, in September 2009, which provided the original inspiration for this collection. Sue Simpson and Tony Burns deserve a special mention for their help and support throughout. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the UK Political Studies Associations Marxist Specialist Group and the PSA Anarchist Studies Network, who, in supporting this conference, made it possible for some of the contributors, and many others whose excellent papers could not be included, to meet and exchange ideas face-to-face in a convivial environment.

Jean-Christophe Angaut has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the cole Normale Suprieure de Lyon since 2006. His fields of research and teaching are nineteenth-century philosophy, political philosophy and connections between socialist, communist and anarchist thought. He has published two books on the young Bakunins thought: Bakounine jeune hglien La philosophie et son dehors (2007) and La libert des peuples Bakounine et les rvolutions de 1848 (2009). He has also published articles on Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, the Young Hegelian movement and the situationists. He is a member of the editorial committee of the French anarchist journal Rfractions.

David Bates is a principal lecturer and Director of Politics and International Relations in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. His interests are focused primarily in the area of radical politics, including anti-capitalist forms of thinking. He has a particular concern with Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to socialist emancipation. More recently he has been interested in the critical relationship between Marxist and libertarian radical politics.

David Berry is Senior Lecturer in History at Loughborough University, UK. He was awarded his DPhil in French labour history from the University of Sussex, UK. His research area is the history of the Left and of labour movements in twentieth-century France. He has worked mostly on the French anarchist movement and alternative Left, and is currently working on the life and ideas of Daniel Gurin (19041988) and the libertarian communist tradition from 1917 to the present. His publications include A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 19171945 (2009) and (edited jointly with Constance Bantman) New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational (2010). Having been involved for some years with the Journal of Contemporary European Studies (formerly the Journal of Area Studies), he is currently an associate editor and reviews editor of the journal Anarchist Studies. He is a member of the Centre International de Recherches sur lAnarchisme, Lausanne and Marseille, of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France and of the Anarchist Studies Network.

Paul Blackledge is Professor of Political Theory and UCU Branch Secretary at Leeds Beckett University, UK. He is author of Marxism and Ethics (2012), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (2006) and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (2004). He is co-editor of Virtue and Politics (2011), Alasdair MacIntyres Engagement with Marxism (2008), Revolutionary Aristotelianism (2008) and Historical Materialism and Social Evolution (2002). He has written on Marxism and anarchism in