Bill Ayers

On September 10, 2024 Beacon Press will publish When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation. Please preorder today, and help bring this work to Life.

Pre-Order:When Freedom is the Question…

https://bookshop.org/p/books/when-freedom-is-the-question-abolition-is-the-answer-reflections-on-collective-liberation-bill-ayers/20969787?ean=9780807020340

I was thrilled when Teachers College Press published The Good Preschool Teacher in 1989, and then surprised me by sending me five free books—one for Bernardine, one for me, one for each of our kids…five books gone in a blink. When my brother asked for a copy, I explained that they were all gone, and anyway, “If you don’t buy a book, who will?” His response: “If my brother won’t give me a free book, who will?”

Thirty books later, I’ll repeat the sentiment: if a book is to have any chance at a life, it depends in the first place on the support of family, friends, and comrades.

On September 10, 2024 Beacon Press will publish When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation. Please preorder today, and help bring this work to Life.

Pre-Order:When Freedom is the Question…

https://bookshop.org/p/books/when-freedom-is-the-question-abolition-is-the-answer-reflections-on-collective-liberation-bill-ayers/20969787?ean=9780807020340

Pre-Order:When Freedom is the Question…

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/the-neck-and-the-sword

Let’s work together NOW to resist fascism. Here’s one small thing we can each do with friends, collegues, neighbors:

AN INVITATION to PARTICIPATE:

https://www.writersfordemocraticaction.org/ichh

THE SCRIPT:
https://billayers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/46683-itcan27thappenhere-again-final-3-27-2024.pdf

Yes, “fascism” is an electrifying word, freighted with a brutal history and evoking an unthinkable dystopia.

But “fascism” has a precise meaning beyond the optics of swastikas and jack-booted SS men. Fascism is not consigned to a particular place or a specific moment, Europe in the mid-Twentieth Century, say. And fascism is not necessarily the result of a coup or a military putsch—in fact the most notorious fascist regime in history came to power through a legal and democratic process. It’s long been said that if fascism ever came to America it would come with a familiar face wrapped in an American flag.

And it’s arrived—extreme forms of social disintegration are on the near horizon.

Fascism is a form of government that opposes liberal democracy, Marxism, socialism, and anarchism, and attempts to forge national unity under an autocratic leader with a totalitarian program advocating stability, law and order, and more and more centralized power, claiming all of this is necessary in order to defend the homeland, and to respond effectively to economic instability. Fascist states attempt to mobilize a mass base through deliberately constructed fear and hatred as they prepare for armed conflict and permanent war by appealing to patriotic nationalism and militarizing all aspects of society. Fascists agitate “popular” movements in the streets, often violent and para-military, apparently spontaneous, but in reality well-funded and highly organized, based on bigotry, intolerance, and the threat of violence, all of it fueled by the demonization of targeted, distinct racial, religious, or gendered vulnerable populations and the creation of convenient sacrificial scapegoats who are repeatedly blamed for every social or economic problem people experience. Fascist regimes intertwine the government with religious fundamentalism, promote disdain for the arts, for intellectual life, for reason and evidence, as well as deep contempt for the necessary back and forth of serious argument or discussion. And fascist states favor protectionist and interventionist economic policies as they entangle corporations with the state.

On the Independence Day, it’s time to build a broad united front against fascism.