Tag: Communes

Free Download Anderson Bean, "Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis "
English | ISBN: 179364084X | 2022 | 172 pages | EPUB, PDF | 2 MB + 5 MB
Since 2006, Venezuela has witnessed an explosion of different forms of popular power and participatory democracy. Over 47,000 grassroots neighborhood-based communal councils and 3,000 communes have been constructed. In Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis, Anderson Bean offers a critical analysis of these experiments in popular and workers’ power and their potential for societal transformation within and beyond Venezuela. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Bean demonstrates how workers and peasants, through networks of popular power, exercise agency over their own development while facing challenges from the capitalist state. Most importantly, this book connects with the far-reaching implications that the communal movement in Venezuela has for building a society responsive more to the needs of ordinary people than to the desires of the elites.

Free Download Iain Boal, Janferie Stone, "West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California"
English | 2012 | ISBN: 1604864273, 1604867183 | PDF | pages: 321 | 13.2 mb
In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a significant part of an entire generation refused their assigned roles in the American century. Some took their revolutionary politics to the streets, others decided simply to turn away, seeking to build another world together, outside the state and the market. West of Eden charts the remarkable flowering of communalism in the 1960s and ’70s, fueled by a radical rejection of the Cold War corporate deal, utopian visions of a peaceful green planet, the new technologies of sound and light, and the ancient arts of ecstatic release. The book focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area and its hinterlands, which have long been creative spaces for social experiment. Haight-Ashbury’s gift economy-its free clinic, concerts, and street theatre-and Berkeley’s liberated zones-Sproul Plaza, Telegraph Avenue, and People’s Park-were embedded in a wider network of producer and consumer co-ops, food conspiracies, and collective schemes.