All the Power (Revolution Without Illusion)

“Does organized rebellion need its own Martha Stewart? Relax, this isn’t it. In your grasp is a heartfelt, brick-by-brick guide from a committed veteran activist on heart, soul, music, his own life’s surprises, and how we can all bring ongoing change to our own communities.” —Jello Biafra

An ambitious, accessible mix of history, autobiography, and how-to-manual, this “anti-manifesto” challenges popular concepts of radical activism. Long-time inner-city organizer and punk rabble-rouser Mark Andersen takes aim at the illusions that tend to keep North American radicals self-satisfied but ineffective. A whirlwind tour across decades—through punk and student activism, identity and lifestyle politics, animal rights, armed struggle, patriotism, globalization, and beyond—this book seeks a radicalism that is both rigorously self-critical and genuinely populist. Leaping from agrarian socialist experiments of the early twentieth century to embattled 1960s streets to the fiercely independent punk underground of the 1980s and ’90s to the present-day global-justice movement, All the Power suggests how the seemingly most idealistic of enterprises—revolution—might be practically accomplished.