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Almost everything you consume, from your weekly supermarket trip to the presents you order online, arrives by cargo ship. Shipping is the engine of the world economy, transporting eleven billion tonnes of goods each year. Despite the clear environmental crisis, shipping emissions have doubled since 1990 to more than one billion tonnes of CO2 – more than aviation, more than all of Germany, or even France, Britain, and Italy combined. As the shipping industry is forecast to grow threefold by 2050, full decarbonisation is urgent to limit catastrophic climate change. To understand whether there are any realistic alternatives to the polluting status quo of the container shipping industry, in 2020, Christiaan De Beukelaer spent 150 days as part of a sailing crew aboard the Avontuur, a century-old two-masted schooner fitted for cargo. This book recounts both this personal odyssey and the journey the shipping industry is embarking on to cut its carbon emissions. It shows that the Avontuur’s mission remains as crucial as ever: the shipping industry needs to cut its use of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Otherwise, we will face excessive global warming and the dire outcomes that will bring. The book explores our path to an uncertain future. It argues that shipping symbolises the kind of economy we’ve built: a gargantuan global machine that delivers the goods at an enormous environmental cost. Merely eliminating carbon emissions or improving efficiency won’t solve the underlying issue. If we can’t make shipping truly sustainable, we can’t solve the climate crisis.
resultant endorsement of pluralistic and heterogeneous paths to human liberation. This creates a practical challenge to the idea of closure since it raises the possibility of stagnation and renewed hierarchies even in a society where present structures of inequality have been abolished. The third and final section examines the ramifications of utopian destabilisation in relation to contemporary anarchism’s emphasis on constructive direct action and prefigurative politics and the revival of anarchist individualism. Here it is argued that these features point to a
than to paralyse us.’ In this chapter, I unravel some of the complexities within Athenian street- protests. I begin by looking at the characteristics of street-protests, performative violence and the role of Black Bloc tactics. I propose that militant street-protests are acts of political communication and examples of anarchist Street-protests and emotions 129 and anti-authoritarian prefigurative politics (as I wrote earlier, prefigurative politics means that the way in which activists conduct themselves today should convey an anarchist understanding of social
The chapter begins by introducing the key ideals and principles central to social anarchist discourse. It then suggests there are certain ideas in Cole’s guild socialist writings that, suitably revised, offer a sound base upon which to build a new model of social anarchism. This serves as the essential premise upon which to frame a specific anarchist-Marxist dialogue, which seeks to breathe new life into the classical anarchist project. Bakunin and Kropotkin received Marx’s argument that the relations within and between social classes are the foundational inequalities through which capitalism systematically reproduces itself sympathetically, yet at the same time they defined class more extensively, and they fiercely rejected his prescribed role for a communist revolutionary state, spearheaded by an authoritarian vanguard. Here the chapter puts forward a rationale for rejecting state communism whilst retaining Marx’s penetrating critique of the capitalist mode of production. Both anarchism and Marxism are committed to instigating a world beyond inequality and exploitation, where production need not be an alienating experience. Although tensions between the two schools of anti-capitalist thought remain, especially on the question of prefigurative politics, the chapter explains that at the same time, there are certain ideal and maxims that are held in common, which consist of themes central to social anarchism and non-statist communism. The resulting conception constellation regards Marx’s sophisticated analyses of political economy and the anarchist suspicion of the main institutions of the modern state as mutually enriching. It is this amalgamation that permeates the entire constitution of associational anarchism. In sum, associational anarchism’s plural democracy is the practical application of the key ideals of class-struggle anarchism, and it is the libertarian edge of democratic Marxism.
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.
The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement has been reinvigorated in recent years. Its public protests and battles against the Greek state, police and other capitalist institutions are prolific and highly visible, replete with rioting, barricades and Molotov cocktails. This book is concerned not so much with anarchist theory, as with examining the forces that give the Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement its specific shape. The author draws on Alberto Melucci's (1995a) work on collective identity, while offering a first-hand, ethnographic account of Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians in action, based on his time there in 2011 and 2013, living, squatting and protesting within this milieu. In the course of the chapters of the book, the author argues that varying shades of anarchic tendencies, and ensuing ideological and practical disagreements, are overcome for the most part in (often violent) street-protests. Athenian anarchists and antiauthoritarians are a pertinent area of research because of both their politics and their geographical location. There is the whole 'rise of anarchism throughout the activist world' phenomenon, visible from Seattle to Genoa, Quebec City to São Paulo. Anarchist and anti-authoritarian social movements are prominent actors in resistance to the current phase of capitalism in multiple, global locations. Throughout Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and the Antipodes, radical resistance to neo-liberalism often has an anarchist and/ or anti-authoritarian cast.
emancipation Space and prefigurative politics By focusing on space as potentiality, and by acknowledging the capacity to think and act through space as a crucial human capacity, we can reformulate the problem of prefiguration and prefigurative politics. The simple and historically most enduring way to conceive of prefigurative politics is as those practices in which means reflect (mirror, look like) the ends. In prefigurative politics, visions of a different society are supposed to shape struggles to establish such a society according to the same values that support these
Utopia is an ideal society in an imaginary country. 'Utopia' in Greek means 'No place', and utopias are frustratingly to be found on faraway islands, continents or planets which are difficult to reach. Philosophers and writers have followed the prophets and been quick to offer their own versions of utopia. While anarchism has always had a utopian dimension in the sense of imagining a free society without the state, not all literary utopias have been anarchistic. Anarchist utopias value mutual aid and solidarity as well as personal freedom and autonomy. The anarchist utopia is not the closed space of a perfect society but engages in constant struggle against protean forms of domination, hierarchy and exploitation. Wary of the many potential pitfalls of utopian speculation and, in particular, of the ways in which it may constrain free thinking rather than enrich it, many anarchists are now united far more by what they are against than what they are for. The primary aim of this book is to encourage further reflection on the wisdom of such blanket anarchist anti-utopianism. It does so by assembling the first collection of original essays to explore the relationship between anarchism and utopianism and, in particular, the ways in which their long historical interaction from the Warring States epoch of ancient China to the present day has proven fruitful for emancipatory politics.
retrain the internalised habits of mind and action that they have acquired as participants in a system of domination, and (b) collectives establish modes of living-together based on a shared moral commitment to mutual respect and egalitarian reciprocity. A characteristic feature of prefigurative politics is its refusal to separate ends from means in the pursuit of just social relations: the only means by which such relations can be established are those that are compatible with the end of egalitarian respect. There are numerous historical examples of prefigurative
also involved in the east coast peace movement. It was this interaction between Food Not Bombs and the anti-nuke movement that helped redefine contemporary American anarchism. Within the anti-nuke movements, anarchist politics merged with the praxis and politics of radical Quakers, leading to the development of a strongly democratic and prefigurative politics, which as we shall see, became central to the politics of Food Not Bombs (Epstein, 1991). In working with the east coast anti-nuke movement, the group helped organize both the June 12, 1982, “March for Nuclear