Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra I PDF Download

Author: Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Mexico)
Publisher: Paperboat Press
ISBN: 9780979799327
Category : Capitalism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"How do we comprehend a crisis that simultaneously began over 500 years ago and yet looms on our immediate horizon? What unites the grave situation of Greece with that of the tens of thousands of killed and disappeared in Mexico? What might explain the recurring failure and seeming betrayal, in country after country, of the electoral left? How might gentrification of urban centers across the world be inextricably connected to the pipelines of an unhinged extractivism (from Bolivia to Standing Rock)? How can we explain that on a daily basis, an ever-greater proportion of humanity is expelled from production and abandoned to its fate as simple surplus? In this daring book, the Zapatistas put forth the hypothesis that a rigorous application of critical thought shows us that the inner connection of these phenomena can be found in the historically unprecedented crisis of capitalism that today gathers steam and in the near future promises to engulf all of humanity in a perfect storm. In May of 2015, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) hosted a seminar in Chiapas, Mexico, titled "Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra," in which they invited thinkers from across the world to join them in analyzing the economic instability, unceasing war, mass displacement, and ecological devastation that today characterize our world. This book presents the complete set of interventions made by the EZLN at that seminar. Rescuing critical thought from both the trendy relativism of contemporary academia and the tweets and facebook posts that now stand in for it, the EZLN outlines the contours of this crisis as well as the innovative practices of politics that have allowed Zapatismo to survive and constitute one of the few large-scale anti-capitalist struggles in the world today. Yet the Zapatistas don't offer themselves as a model to be followed, but rather insist that each of us analyze this crisis from our own locations in order to adequately confront the monumental task before us. The volume closes with poetry and art solicited by the EZLN from various artists and authors as their contribution to the seminar. This text is a translation of the book, El Pensamiento Crítico Frente a la Hidra Capitalista I, published in Mexico by the EZLN in July of 2015. That text and this English translation include several texts not publicly presented at the seminar. In addition, various theorists, intellectuals, and militants from around the world were invited to offer presentations to the more than 2,600 seminar attendees. Their contributions can be found in Spanish in Volumes II and III of this series, published in Mexico."--Publisher.

Author: Jérôme Baschet
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849355711
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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An exploration of the Zapatista project, from its conception to the present. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Mayan Indigenous uprising in Chiapas, The Zapatista Experience reconstructs the trajectory of the Zapatista struggle over the last three decades, both in its concrete achievements and in its contributions to the renewal of critical and antisystemic thinking. The Zapatista rebellion has become a reference and source of inspiration for many struggles around the world due to its major contribution in reformulating a credible and desirable path to emancipation, a path that broke with previously dominant conceptions: state-centric, productivist, Eurocentric, modernist, and patriarchal. Baschet demonstrates how the Zapatistas have succeeded in materializing, on a massive scale, the concrete experience of another way of living, a forerunner of possible emerging worlds. The autonomous rebel territories of Chiapas are among the most developed and radical of the "real utopias" that exist in the world today, exceptional in their experiments in self-governance and anti-State political form, argues Jérôme Baschet. The Zapatista Experience orients readers in the profusion of Zapatista writings concerning, for example, the elaboration of a different understanding of politics, the Zapatistas' planetary conjunctural analysis of capitalism as a total war against humanity, their conception of Indigeneity that breaks with both modernist individualism and identity politics, and their notion of time and history. All this in clear opposition to neoliberal capitalism.

Author: Raúl Zibechi
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849355436
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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A new collection from one of Latin America's most dynamic radical thinkers—in the tradition of Frantz Fanon and Eduardo Galeano. Constructing Worlds Otherwise sets itself against the recolonization of Latin America by one-dimensional, ethnocentric perspectives that permeate the North American left and block fundamental social change in the Global South. In a provocative mix of polemic and on-the-ground analysis, Raúl Zibechi argues that it is time for radicals in the Global North to learn from the people their governments have colonized and oppressed for centuries. Through a survey of the most marginalized voices across Latin America—feminists, the Indigenous, people of African descent, and inhabitants of urban favelas and shantytowns—he introduces the Anglo world to a range of critical perspectives and new forms of struggle. For Zibechi, real change comes from “societies in movement,” the people already fighting for their survival using egalitarian and traditional models of world-building, without the state, without official representatives, and without vanguards of political experts. His book contributes to global geographies of autonomous and anti-state thinking, with Zibechi placing his work in conversation with the ideological theorist of Kurdish resistance, Abdullah Öcalan, for a rich and dynamic survey of global movements of decolonization. Now more urgent than ever, this translation by George Ygarza Quispe comes at a time when the global left—struggling to expand its vision in a time of climate chaos and rising authoritarianism—finds itself at an impasse, desperate to animate and renew its critical imaginary.

Author: Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849352933
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Zapatista spokesman Subcommander Marcos decreased his public appearances between 2007 and 2014, but simultaneously increased the depth of his analysis. Collected here in English translation for the first time, these talks include some of his most explicit, detailed, and inspiring criticisms of capitalism, political parties, electoral democracy, disingenuous solidarity, and much more. Subcommander Marcos was the leading spokesperson for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) until 2014. Nick Henck is Associate Professor at Keio University and the author of Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask. Henry Gales is a freelance translator living in Mexico City.

Author: Henck Nick Henck
Publisher: Black Rose Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1551647060
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
The unexpected insurrection of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994 toppled the notion that the triumph of neoliberalism represented the end of history. In the clamor that followed, a masked, pipe-smoking horseman appeared as the spokesperson for the indigenous rebels. In this book, Nick Henck provides a concise and accessible overview of the life, thought, and achievements of the professor-turned-guerrilla Subcomandante Marcos. Through his academic exodus and immersion in the indigenous communities of the Lacandon jungle, to his participation in a guerilla army, to his eloquent articulation of the struggles of oppressed peoples around the world, Marcos became a revered and inspiring enigma. Henck explores Marcos's considerable accomplishments in four main fields: his role as spokesperson for the Zapatistas; his contribution to Latin American literature and a new political language for the left; his work in making Mexico a more democratic, inclusive, and just nation; and his role as an inspirational international political icon. Published for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Zapatista uprising, this book is not just a biography but also a reminder that there are alternative ways of doing politics: that another world is possible.

Author: Andrea Fleschenberg, Kai Kresse, Rosa Cordillera Castillo
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110780658
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Author: Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez
Publisher: Juan Manuel Escamilla González Aragón
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
One of the temptations of the preacher is to make all conversations about grace too “nice”. But a true preacher of grace, like Carlos, knows that this does not help people grow in faith at all. In this book, Carlos continues his ambitious, multi-volume quest to make it possible to live the Christian faith authentically without either dumbing down our intelligence or forcing us into a Stockholm syndrome of speaking “well” while tamping down the realities through which we are really living. Hence, Carlos has put his nets deep into the life experiences of different groups of those who have lost, of those for whom the outrage of death is a constant reality, and who have had to learn a new language in order to speak at all. All this is in service of giving us a sense of how much of a shake-up truly theological faith in the resurrection is when it is discovered on the inside by those who have found themselves caught up in an an-archic uprising of hope. I learned much from this book. –James Alison, priest and theologian. Feast of St Dominic, 2024. The Resurrection as a Messianic Anticipation signals the road ahead for political and liberation theologies. We can and must place our hope in the resurrection even as the world around us continues to collapse, as the specter of global violence escalates, and as the body counts mount. This prescient, scholarly work faces directly the horrors of our time and uncovers a credible theological response among the survivors. It is a must-read. – Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Loyola Marymount University This powerful book calls us to rise up against death and senseless violence. It reclaims resurrection as a communal praxis of indomitable life. It cries out with the victims of history and remembers their radiant hopes of ecstatic transformation. It is revolutionary in the best sense of the word. – Andrew Prevot, author of The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy and Feminism The first part of a trilogy on the idea of tradition, The Resurrection as a Messianic Anticipation, proposes a theology of new life from a postmodern and decolonial perspective. This investigation of the resurrection’s foundational event starts from the analysis of intersubjectivity in our times of extreme violence, based on the creative imagination deployed by the systemic victims. From this existential background, the author offers a creative reading of the Christian faith in the full life of the "Crucified One Awoke" dialoguing with the reason that arises from the social, cultural, and spiritual resistances that dismantle the violence produced by patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism colluded with sacrificial religion. It will be followed by two volumes on the theology of tradition thought as a symbolic resistance and as a political sacramentality of the new world born from the reverse side of hegemonic history where it is possible to listen to the murmur of God thanks to the persons and communities that live the messianic times as a living tradition in constant transformation containing an ethical, political and spiritual task for all humanity. Carlos Mendoza-Álvarez OP is a Mexican theologian. He holds a doctorate in Fundamental Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he also obtained his habilitation. His work proposes a Fundamental Theology where the Phenomenology of Subjectivity, Mimetic Theory, and Decolonial Thought converge in dialogue with Social Movements from the Global South. He is a full professor in the Theology Department at Boston College. He has published eight monographs, thirty chapters in collective works, and sixty articles in scientific journals. His books include a trilogy on the idea of revelation: Deus Liberans (Fribourg, 1996), Deus absconditus (Paris, 2011), and Deus ineffabilis (Barcelona, 2015).

Author: Antonio Maria Pusceddu
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805395939
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Resource extraction exists in diverse settings across the world and is carried out through different practices. The Global Life of Mines provides a comprehensive framework examining the spatial and temporal relationships between mining and postmining as interrelated and coexisting features within the global minescape. The book brings together scholars from various fields, such as anthropology, geography, sociology and political science, examining ethnographic case studies throughout the Americas (Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, USA), Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Europe (Italy, Arctic Norway and Spain).

Author: Anthony Faramelli
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350050075
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Examining the under-theorized relationship between revolution and fascism, this book outlines a politics of resistance to these forms of domination. Through an examination of the psychic conditions created by integrated world capitalism, as well as by the revolutionary projects that oppose this form of financial and social organization, Anthony Faramelli identifies the limits of revolutionary thinking. In doing so he argues that revolutionary projects inevitably reproduce the same organization of life and structures of control as capitalism. Following its analysis of revolution and fascism, this book argues for a way out of our current political stasis through the development of a philosophically informed practice of resistance termed 'assemblage politics'. Drawing on the resistant philosophies developed by Deleuze and Guattari, Howard Caygill's defiant philosophy, and the Zapatista insurgents, the form of resistance proposed is marked by a structural fluidity that allows it to avoid being captured by capitalism's repressive structures. Enabling a better understanding of the current social-political landscape, and providing a fuller context of the political necessity to move away from notions of revolution, this book is relevant to those interested in postcolonial theory and Latin American politics, political philosophy and the growing field of resistance studies.

Author: Arturo Escobar
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012102
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
In Pluriversal Politics Arturo Escobar engages with the politics of the possible and how established notions of what is real and attainable preclude the emergence of radically alternative visions of the future. Reflecting on the experience, philosophy, and practice of indigenous and Afro-descendant activist-intellectuals and on current Latin American theoretical-political debates, Escobar chronicles the social movements mobilizing to defend their territories from large-scale extractive operations in the region. He shows how these movements engage in an ontological politics aimed at bringing about the pluriverse—a world consisting of many worlds, each with its own ontological and epistemic grounding. Such a politics, Escobar contends, is key to crafting myriad world-making stories telling of different possible futures that could bring about the profound social transformations that are needed to address planetary crises. Both a call to action and a theoretical provocation, Pluriversal Politics finds Escobar at his critically incisive best.