Cindy Milstein

Cindy Milstein is a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, coorganizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, and author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations (IAS/AK Press, 2010) and the forthcoming collaboration with Erik Ruin Paths toward Utopia: Explorations in Everyday Anarchism (PM Press, spring 2012).

She has actively been engaged in numerous collective projects aimed at creating autonomous spaces of resistance, reconstruction, and education, including most recently, Station 40 in San Francisco, and before that, Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont. She also taught at the “anarchist summer school” called the Institute for Social Ecology, and has long been involved in community organizing and social/political movements from below, including the Hope from People Not Presidents campaign and the New World from Below convergence at the Social Forum in Detroit.

Her essays appear in several anthologies, including Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority and Globalize Liberation. When not at home, now in her new home of West Philly, she travels frequently to do public speaking and popular education around topics related to anarchism, direct democracy, anticapitalism, and other political interventions, to encourage critical thought and prefigurative politics. She can be reached at [email protected], although right now, because she’s joyfully throwing herself into the occupation at Philly and the first living, breathing example of self-governance she’s ever been honored to be a participant in with so many wonderful, diverse people, she’s extra bad about returning emails.Check out Cindy Milstein & Erik Ruin present Paths toward Utopia at the Baltimore Radical Bookfair

• Book events
• Reviews
• More from Cindy

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Praise

“Writing-speaking differently is part of the struggle for the world we want to create and are creating, a world that moves against-and-beyond capitalism. These picture-essay-poems break the existing world both in what they say and how they say it. A fabulous book”.
—John Holloway, author of Crack Capitalism

“Paths toward Utopia combines beautiful art, crafted insights, and exemplary stories to plant inspiring seeds of a better future. What more could one ask for?”
—Michael Albert, author of Parecon: Life after Capitalism

“This remarkable book is inspiring and emboldening, allowing us to see the contours of another world that is not only possible but already in formation.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975

“Paths toward Utopia winds us through the political beliefs we know in our hearts, but sometimes lose sight of. It grounds us, embodies us, makes us feel wonder and see the beauty of the work we are doing.”
—Cindy Crabb, author of Doris zine

“This fine collection of graphic essays indicts a contemporary failure of imagination, and restores utopian politics that does not surrender to the drumbeat of everyday emergencies, tasks, and defeats.”
—Andrej Grubacic, author of Wobblies and Zapatistas

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Book Events

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Reviews

• Sketching Anarchy: An Interview with Erik Ruin
• Paths toward Utopia: A Peace News Review
• Cindy Milstein and Erik Ruin Present Paths toward Utopia at the Baltimore Radical Bookfair Pavilion

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Interviews

• Why do we wait? On the revolutionary potential of death and grief.— Cindy Milstein on This is Hell
• Cindy Milstein on Collective Care, Grief, and How To Do Mutual Aid During A Pandemic— Mutual Aid on Lockdown
• Anarchy & the Rise of Mutual Aid with Cindy Milstein on the Unbroken Chain Podcast
• Cindy Milstein’s Paths toward Utopia on the Black Agenda Report
• Cindy Milstein and Erik Ruin Present Paths toward Utopia at the Baltimore Radical Bookfair Pavilion

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Mentions

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Blog

• “Outside the Circle“, Dispatches from the frontline of Occupy Philadelphia
• “Anarchism in Thought, and in the Streets”: Cindy on KPFA’s Against the Grain
• “On Radicalism”: Cindy on Deep Green Philly

• Why do we wait? On the revolutionary potential of death and grief.— Cindy Milstein on This is Hell
• Cindy Milstein on Collective Care, Grief, and How To Do Mutual Aid During A Pandemic— Mutual Aid on Lockdown
• Anarchy & the Rise of Mutual Aid with Cindy Milstein on the Unbroken Chain Podcast
• Cindy Milstein’s Paths toward Utopia on the Black Agenda Report
• The Power to Stay: Magical Realism from SF’s Mission
• Google Will Never Be a “Good Neighbor”; We Need to Be Our Own Best Hope
• Organizing Social Spaces as If Social Relations Matter
• What Silence Might Say
• Anarchism
• Homes Not Games
• This Heart of Mine, This Heart of Yours
• Talk to Neighbors, Not Cops
• This Life That Should Be Eros
• Hard Remembering
• Are Our Communities Strong Enough for Police to Be Obsolete?
• Throwing a Wrench in the “Capitalism Works” Piece
• Red and Black Vienna
• Deathwatch
• Organizing as If Social Relations Matter
• Messy—This Is What Democracy Might Always Look Like . . . But It’s Worth It
• Alone in This, Together
• Dispatches from Hurricaned NY: Scariest Halloween Ever
• The Shades of Love
• Occupy Anarchism
• Fragility & Heartbreak, Michigan, Night 26
• Fragility & Heartbreak, Montreal, Night 115
• Revving up for August, Montreal, Night 94
• Pieces from Orchestrole 4, Montreal, Night 93
• This Bike Is a Poster, or “A-Anti-Anticapitalista,” Montreal, Night 51
• May Day Matters
• Sadness, Like Fog, as SFPD Kills Again
• Home as Bittersweet War Zone
• The Art of Remembering, Which Is Also the Art of Seeing This World of Pain and Love
• “My Neighbors . . . “
• “It’s a War Zone”
• “In the Street for Social Strike,” Montreal, Night 110
• “From Ayotzinapa to Ferguson, the State Is Our Enemy”