We Get By (with a little help from our friends)

my students’ favorite anarchist books and podcasts

Apr 28, 2025

I’ve been teaching a course on anarchism in history and practice, this past half year. It’s been a huge learning process for me – about anarchist pedagogy, teaching with structure and resources but not a prefabricated syllabus, letting students guide their own learning but also knowing how to step in if they need the guidance, and also committing to a (voluntary) scheduled workload while also navigating serious health problems and life difficulties.

I hope my students have also gotten a lot out of it! Some of them are preparing their final projects, and I’m really proud of them (the ones with projects and the ones who knew how to say, ‘life is too much right now, and I need to step back for a bit’).

Since there’s no syllabus, I help guide each student through the questions that are relevant to them, and suggest how to bring an anarchist lens or methodology to each of those questions. Among other things, that means they’re not all reading the same books (articles/documentaries/podcasts…) and sometimes they share new texts with me!

I asked them for the readings they got the most out of these past months, and here are some of their responses:

Klee Benally, No Spiritual Surrender

Dean Spade, Mutual Aid

Cole, Struthers, and Zimmers (eds.), Wobblies of the World

Staughton Lynd, Solidarity Unionism

Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, Inflamed

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch

A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and the Void Collective (eds.), We Are an Image from the Future

Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra

me! The Solutions Are Already Here

me! “Commoning and Scarcity”

Diana Denham and the CASA Collective (eds.), Teaching Rebellion in Oaxaca

podcasts: Srsly Wrong, Citations Needed

Death Panel podcast

Riane Eisler, Chalice and the Blade

Mejias and Couldry, Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done

Kirwin Shaffer, Black Flag Boricuas

Ashanti Alston interview, Solidarity Spirituality and Liberatory Promise on a Turtle’s Back

Carla Joy Bergman and Nick Montgomery, Joyful Militancy

Lev Zlodey and Jason Radegas, Here at the Center of the World in Revolt

I really want to recommend Vikki Law and send some love her way. She’s a long time radical and writer who focuses on prisons and gender. If you’re not familiar with her work, check this out:

https://victorialaw.net/writings/

Here are some helpful suggestions from another good newsletter to subscribe to,

Workshops4Gaza

: “consider making a donation to the Sameer Project! Also, check out this resource (link) from Workers in Palestine: a helpful map of every major weapons manufacturer producing the bombs being dropped on Gaza.”

Here’s a fundraiser for people targeted by the FBI in recent raids in Michigan as the ongoing criminalization of anyone speaking out against the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians

Some friends helped make this important documentary on the 2019-2020 “Estallido Social” in Chile, a major uprising that was finally pacified by leftists and the false promise of constitutional reform: Fell in Love with Fire

And this just dropped: Episode 1 of InterRebellium, a new series by those wizards at SubMedia, this one also on the Estallido Social in Chile

And finally, two articles recommended by a friend:

An article of interviews with the children of several Black Panthers and what they learned from growing up in the revolution and intimately experiencing government repression

Judith Butler on the ongoing criminalization of trans people

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thanks to R for the photos— consider subscribing to her newsletter too:

Raechel Anne Jolie