San Francisco was turning into a jungle–more and more people living in cars, more and more mobs roaming the streets, more and more dangers in day-to-day living.
Rheinhardt was a sculptor who did the best he could in San Francisco… until they drafted his best friend to fight in South America… until his artist’s colony turned into a home for spoiled no-talents… until his girlfriend began to ask him where he was going… until he felt like he couldn’t stand it any more.
Justinian was a mystery man, a Vietnam vet who stalked Rheinhardt quietly, waiting for the right moment. Waiting to take him to Subterranean Gallery.
“Subterranean Gallery is a day-after-tomorrow SF novel with an authentically funky lived-in quality that immediately convinces the reader that its characters and settings are real, that the urban future of the United States is likely to be very much the way Russo imagines it, and that people of compassion and creativity may still find it in themselves to bring forth from oppression and desolation a revivifying hope. Reading Subterranean Gallery is an engrossing, gut-wrenching experience–but ultimately and uplifting one as well.” -Michael Bishop, author of The Secret Ascension
I quite like this short essay/biography of Machiavelli. The author of The Prince. (free ebook) Or Barnes & Noble
Chutzpah, perhaps? Entitlement, even? Or maybe just an ironic contrast to Vettori, who has access to the real halls of power? Probably all of the above, but it is above all a performance. Machiavelli here uses an ancient rhetorical technique called prosopoeia. From the Greek prósopon (“face, person,” and poiéin “to make, to do”), it is a trope of personification. As the Roman orator Quintilian explains, prosopoeia is used “to introduce conversations between ourselves and others. We are even allowed in this form of speech to bring down the gods from heaven or raise the dead.”8 This is exactly what Machiavelli is doing: he conjures the souls of the dead. After all, every time we read, we breathe into texts whose afterlife exists because of us. We revivify figures that are no longer here. But we are dependent on them in turn — they give us a storehouse of language and ideas, and we make them live again through our own words and voices. Reading as necromancy, then.
W. E. B. Du Bois may have been thinking about Machiavelli when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.9
“What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight.” —Mike Davis At Haymarket, we believe that books are crucial tools in struggles against racism, imperialism, and capitalism—and for a better world. That’s why we’ve decided to make TEN key ebooks free to download: join us in reading these indispensable works of analysis, history, and strategy. Wherever each of us live, work, and are in community: the time is now to build power and fight back, together. A note for UK readers: Hope in the Dark, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, and Elite Capture are not available for readers in the UK. And, don’t miss out! Until Friday, November 15th, ALL Haymarket Ebooks are 80% Off (that means they’re available for just $2 each)!
Mutual Aid as a concept was first broached by Peter Kropotkin in 1902 (although the concept is older than that.) in a book of Essays called Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. The essays, initially published in the English periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896,[1] explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity (or “mutual aid“) in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic depictions by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. Instead, Kropotkin argues that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities and, along with the conscience, has been promoted through natural selection.
Mutual Aid is considered a fundamental text in anarchist communism.[2] It presents a scientific basis for communism as an alternative to the historical materialism of the Marxists. Kropotkin considers the importance of mutual aid for prosperity and survival in the animal kingdom, in indigenous and early European societies, in the medieval free cities (especially through the guilds), and in the late 19th century village, labor movement, and impoverished people. He criticizes the State for destroying historically important mutual aid institutions, particularly through the imposition of private property.
Many biologists[3][4] (including Stephen Jay Gould, one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of his generation) also consider it an important catalyst in the scientific study of cooperation.[5]
He argued against Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” theory, and this has become somewhat of a tenet among anarchists.
Also there’s a new book titled Mutual Aid by Dean Spade.
Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable. Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.
Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.
Organizing is what mutual aid is about, and it’s easy to do. You can just help your neighbor with a project, that is mutual aid. (The Amish know how to do this.) Start, or contribute to, a community garden, or a community tool share. Small things as well as big things.
Here’s a link to Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, which is helping in the wake of the devastating hurricanes, down south.
I’m going to close this here, I think I’ve given plenty of links to get you started with this. Good luck.
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