Deciding For Ourselves by Cindy Milstein

Deciding For Ourselves by Cindy Milstein

In a time of social and ecological crises, people everywhere are looking for solutions. States and capitalism, rather than providing them, only make matters worse. There's a growing sense that we'll have to fix this mess on our own. But how? Deciding for Ourselves, in the spirit of the Zapatistas, demonstrates that the impossible is possible. A better world through self-determination and self-governance is not only achievable. It is already happening in urban and rural communities around the world--from Mexico to Rojava, Denmark to Greece--as an implicit or explicit replacement for nations, police, and other forms of hierarchical social control. This anthology explores this sense of freedom in the air, as one piece puts it, by looking at contemporary examples of autonomous, directly democratic spaces and the real-world dilemmas they experience, all the while underscoring the egalitarian ways of life that are collectively generated in them.

Cindy Milstein is author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations and editor of the anthologies Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism, Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, and Deciding for Ourselves: The Promise of Direct Democracy. Long engaged in anarchistic organizing, contemporary social movements, and collective spaces, for the past couple years Cindy focused on doing support work for the J20 defendants, touring extensively with her latest edited anthology, Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief, and co-organizing the 2019 Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. Currently, Cindy co-organizes the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking, and is honored, when called on, to do death doula and grief care.