Punk Anarchism

Punk Anarchism is a meditation on negation, a reminder that capitalism cannot cure the catastrophe it creates and that reason grounds its destructive force. Refusing to accept the world ‘as it is’, Parson exposes its idiocy and uses impermanence to urge resistance. The enduring lesson is that the passion for destruction is a creative passion, too! * Ruth Kinna, Professor of Political Philosophy, Loughborough University, UK *Parson delivers a ferocious and uncompromising assault on the death cult of industrial capitalism, weaving together punk aesthetics, nihilist philosophy, and ecological catastrophe into a compelling argument for anti-world politics. This book doesn’t offer false hope or reformist solutions-instead, it embraces the liberatory potential of negation and destruction, calling for nothing less than the complete dismantling of the representational order that is driving us toward civilizational collapse. * Peter Burdon, Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics, University of Adelaide, Australia *Covering the gamut from Russian and Japanese nihilism to Cthulhu and the Sex Pistols, Sean Parson reminds us that in tearing down the world, we still have the planet. Yet, so long as the death cult of capitalism continues to reign it can only ever be met with refusal and punk anarchism. Seeking to explode the difference between art and resistance, Parson offers us a book for our time: angry, nihilistic and beautiful. * James Martel, Professor of Political Science, San Francisco State University, USA *As our systems of political representation crumble, as the society of the spectacle reveals the void at its heart, and as resurgent fascisms feed off a moribund liberalism, Parson’s book resonates like a series of controlled detonations intended to blast a path through the ruins. These pages explore everything from Max Stirner to killer whales, Walter Benjamin to Snowpiercer. To be truly revolutionary, Parson contends, art must be practiced as anti-art, theory as anti-theory, and politics as salvage. This is cultural critique in the style of legendary British anarcho-punk collective Crass – provocative, uncompromising, and crackling with urgency. * Aidan Tynan, Reader in English Literature, Cardiff University, UK *

Sean Parson is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University, USA. They are the author of Cooking Up a Revolution: Resistance to Gentrification (2019) and the co-editor of four edited books including Representations of Political Resistance and Emancipation in Science Fiction (2020).