Mastodawn

Anarchists, academics, general interested political folks!:
I'm looking for writings on the importance of political imagination for political progress.

I feel like I often come across this kind of thinking in passing in radical literature (e.g. 'even just asking the question about what a world without prisons might look like itself makes it possible'), but I don't know that I know of an essay or book length defense of its importance. Ideas?

#politics #anarchism #leftism #ideology #theory

Esslar2 17h ago

@pjw David Graeber's "Revolution in Reverse" and "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology " are both brilliant.

@flyhigh Yes! Thank you!

@pjw A Feminist Ethic of Risk, Sharon Welch

@jnl Thank you!

J. Nathan Matias 🦣17h ago

@pjw within religious studies, Bruegemann’s The Prophetic Imagination was a manifesto for this.

@natematias Thank you! Do you think this work would be relevant to someone not working in the Christian tradition?

Sara Hendren 15h ago

@pjw @natematias Even the first couple of chapters might be illuminating, in showing the way the prophetic tradition 1)criticizes the regnant order while also 2) energizing a desirable future. That alloyed state is hard to pull off, but so potent when achieved. I would also suggest a book called Living as Form. Artists working on civic and political life, making work between the imaginative and practical with humor, irony, problem-solving.

Alex Rodríguez 16h ago

@pjw Freedom Dreams by Robin DG Kelley is about exactly this

@arod This looks PERFECT, thank you!

Alex Rodríguez 14h ago

@pjw yeah it's also a really, really good book 😊

the classic in that department would be cornelius castoriadis i guess.

maybe his 'The Discovery of the Imagination' is a start.

edit: fat fingered the name

starting p. 288 in this https://www.notbored.org/cornelius-castoriadis-crossroads-2-human-domains.pdf

Something about „transformative justice“?

Marc "ACAB" Godin 4h ago

@pjw "Rehearsals for Living" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard is a series of letters they wrote each other in the first year of the pandemic that covers some of those themes. Also "Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and emergent strategies" by Andrea J Ritchie gave me lots to think about.

@pjw Not specifically anarchist but I found it a compelling argument
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-10-20/monbiot-need-new-political-narrative/

Monbiot: ‘We Need that New Political Narrative’

George Monbiot has just published his new book, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. He talks to Nick Dowson about it.

resilience

@pjw
Also Murray Bookchin talked about the importance of imagining a different politics.
"The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking."
The Meaning of Confederalism, Green Perspectives, no. 20 (1990).

bituur esztreym 4h ago

@pjw
saw many good ideas in the answers; i'd add
Srećko Horvat, 'Poetry from the Future. Why a Global Liberation Movement Is Our Civilization's Last Chance'.

bencourtice 4h ago

@pjw I don't know of that exact book either but I think the spirit of that question pervades the writings of Michael A. Lebowitz, especially his conception of the state, and I think probably István Mészáros but I haven't read any of his books yet.

Kris Warner 2h ago

@pjw do you know the situationists?