New poetic rants and prose poems from the pseudonymous author of TAZ and Millennium and co-editor of Orgies of the Hemp Eaters, among many other influential, incendiary texts. “BLACK FEZ is the emblem of our intransigent disgust with the lukewarm necromantic vacuum of dephlogisticated corpse breath that passes nowadays for Empire and organic death.”

These insurgent essays describe, prolong and critique some of the cultural and artistic projects that arose with the worldwide wave of protests around the turn of the millennium, against what the global South calls neoliberalism. Dissent and the refusal of a programmed existence continually return to the streets; but they also unfold in the imagination. Complex discourses and elaborate fictions weave their way through images, gestures and hilarious scenarios, hovering at the edges of reality and searching for whoever will give them voice. Museums, cinemas, books and theaters are temporary abodes for such things, and authors are only a convenience. But none of the wilder spirits ever really disappears. Time leaches away the graffiti of revolt, and the cynicism of power lays a new coat of paint. Still the collective phantoms return.

In the warped underworld of Uptown Chicago, two petty thieves, Jack and Vince — Dostoevskyan in their criminal use of philosophy, exalting in the stealing of art as the highest human act — meet their target, their nemesis and their double: Madame Little-Ease, a Satanic Grandma Moses, who paints on refuse with polluted blood.

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How much of contemporary medical practice still derives from a practice rooted in the witch-hunts that plagued Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, and burned at the stake, after horrible torture, hundreds of thousands of midwives and healers along with other poor women — the greatest sexocide in recorded history?

Women’s bodies and their medical knowledge were burned on those stakes to be replaced by a male “science” and a male gynecological profession controlled by the state and church. Has history run its course? Or, among the many reasons given today for hysterectomies, does its abuse still conceal, more or less covertly, a yearning for male domination over women’s bodies that reaches this most lethal form of conquest because it expropriates and destroys what makes a body a woman’s body?

The powerful essays (and accompanying glossaries and testimonials) collected in Gynocide examine the historical, legal, ethical, psychological and medical aspects of deeply sexist practices in defining and treating these issues of contemporary women’s health.

Contributors draw on the important theoretical insights and perspectives developed in recent decades by radical Italian feminism, revealing the complicity of widespread assumptions about the structures and roles of gender, the nuclear family, educational practices, and the state.

In the 1980s, p.m.’s book bolo’bolo became an indispensable guide to new autonomous projects, a manual for "applied utopias" on a human scale, stressing cultural diversity, freedom of movement, ecological sustainability, and a relaxed attitude towards work — themes which remain essential in his new novel, Akiba.

Akiba combines the age-old schemes of millennial and modern utopias with recent research in ecology, quantum physics and computing, the mathematics of the Big Bang, Peak Oil theories, and the work of Roger Penrose, J. R. Searle, and others.

Business has a mad crush on collaboration — witness the billions spent on social networking sites, or all the hype around “collaboration studies.” But beneath all the flirtation, business needs to remain the boss. As long as the process of collaboration is controlled and monetized, the relationship will always be one of forced cooperation. This book argues for Free Cooperation — an alternative way of doing things together, from parenting and the workplace to event organization and cultural production. Brian Holmes, Howard Rheingold, Christoph Spehr and the editors critique the dominant methods of socio-economic integration, and elaborate a practical alternative, one that promises to surmount both the problems of inequality and the lack of independence in daily life.

The Art of Free Cooperation includes a DVD with a feature-length film collage, narrated by Tony Conrad, illustrating the principles of Free Cooperation through the visual language of science fiction movies, additional texts, interviews and highlights from the international “Free Cooperation” conference, organized by the editors, that led to this book.

Provo staged political and cultural interventions into the symbolic and everyday spaces of Holland from 1962–1967. In this first book-length English-language study of their history, Richard Kempton narrates the rise and fall of Provo from early Dutch “happenings” staged in 1962 to the “Death of Provo” in 1967. He chronicles Robert Jasper Grootveld’s anarchist anti-cancer campaign, the riots against Princess Beatrix’s marriage to an ex-Nazi, and the famous White Bicycle program. He also comments on parallel contemporary and near-contemporary movements (including Dada and Situationism), Amsterdam’s previous anarchist traditions, the spread of Provo through Holland and the development of the Kabouter party, and ends by offering an existentialist critique of Provo and other anarchist movements of the 1960s.

Marching Plague examines the scientific evidence and the rhetoric surrounding biological warfare, particularly the development of anthrax and other bio-weapons, and makes a strong case against the likelihood of such weapons ever being used in a terrorist situation. Studying the history and science of such weapons, they conclude that for reasons of accuracy and potency, biological weapons lack the efficiency required to produce the widespread devastation typically associated with bioterrorism.

Why the public urgency around biowarfare, then, and why the channeling of enormous resources into research and development of tools to counter an imaginary threat? This is the real focus of Marching Plague: the deconstruction of an exceedingly complex political economy of fear, primarily supporting biowartech development and the militarization of the public sphere.

Shut Them Down! is an essential collection of reflections on the movement against the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. As well as action stories from the frontlines of resistance to the summit, there are detailed accounts of how various aspects of the mobilisation were organised, and analysis of the lessons to be learned. But Shut Them Down!’s relevance extends far beyond the Gleneagles experience. It addresses fundamental issues such as the nature of openness and ‘horizontality’, and the limitations of the ‘activist’ identity. Most important of all, Shut Them Down! poses the question: how can we take those worlds we glimpse in such moments and generalise them so that they make sense in the rest of our lives?

Contributors include John Holloway, George Caffentsis, members of the Trapese Collective, Starhawk, Massimo De Angelis and Dagmar Diesner, Werner Bonefeld, and members of the Activist-Trauma Support Group.

Visit the Shut Them Down! web site, with much more information on the book, as well as the complete text online .

By rebelling against hierarchical society and living under the Jolly Roger, pirates created an upside-down world of anarchist organization and festival, with violence and death ever-present. This creation was not a purely whimsical process. In The Devil’s Anarchy, Stephen Snelders examines rare 17th-century Dutch pirate histories to show the continuity of a shared pirate culture, embodied in its modes of organization, methods of distributing booty and resolving disputes, and tendencies for high living. Focussing on the careers of Claes Compaen, a cunning, charismatic renegado who claimed to have stolen more than 350 vessels, and Jan Erasmus Reyning, who hit the seas at age 12 and became a buccaneer in the pirate jungles of Santo Domingo, Snelders paints a salty picture of the excesses,
contradictions, and liberatory joys of pirate life.