Audio Anarchy is a project for transcribing anarchist books into audio format.

Hopefully, this can help make anarchist texts and ideas more accessable. Beyond the obvious appeal for people who don't like to read (or don't have time to read in this busy on-the-go world), hearing a book read aloud can also be enjoyable.

The Audio Anarchy project is organized in a distributed way. Instead of having a single person or group of people read an entire book, different people read separate chapters to distribute the work load. Ideally, this site will do more to help facilitate that kind of organization in the future.

Freddy Perlman's Letters Of Insurgents is a thoroughly brilliant story about anarchist ideas. It takes the form of fictional letters between two eastern european workers who were separated after a failed revolution; one spent twelve years in statist jails, the other escaped to the west. After twenty-five years without contact, they begin to write each-other about their experiences, their lives, their hopes, and their memories of the past. The characters that emerge from these narratives tell a story that is both incredibly subtle and infinitely complex. Nothing is taken for granted, no assumptions are left unchallenged, and the reader is left with a set of questions that only a story about relationships could present.

Being a particularly long book, each letter will be presented here a week at a time until the entire recording is finished. And everyone who listens to the entire book will receive a Letters Of Insurgents Merit Badge.

"The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."

Instead of a direct recording of the text, here a collection of people read some of their favorite aphorisms, and tell stories about how those aphorisms relate to their lives.

"Submission to domination is enforced not solely, nor even most significantly, through blatant repression, but rather through subtle manipulations worked into the fabric of everyday social relationships. These manipulations — ingrained in the social fabric not because domination is everywhere and nowhere, but because the institutions of domination create rules, laws, mores and customs that enforce such manipulations — create a logic of submission, an often unconscious tendency to justify resignation and subservience in one's everyday relations in the world. For this reason, it is necessary for those who are serious about developing an anarchist insurrectional project to confront this tendency wherever it appears — in their lives, their relationships and the ideas and practices of the struggles in which they participate. Such a confrontation is not a matter of therapy, which itself partakes of the logic of submission, but of defiant refusal."

"Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life. And life, young or old as we may be, is not something definitive: it is a stake we must play day after day. When we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the ground we must have a good reason for getting up. If we don't it makes no difference whether we are anarchists or not. We might as well stay in bed and sleep."

Alfredo M. Bonanno, an Italian anarchist currently serving six years for charges related to the famous "Marini Trial," writes about insurrectionary anarchism.

"Why do we work? From necessity or love? If the former, then our world is failing us, we are being exploited, being made slaves for the benefit of others. The ethic that work is a 'good thing' is a throwback to a Victorian mentality of puritanical pain and denial of our humanity, an ethic that is so far removed from the reality of our human nature as to be pathological."

A collection of essays written from the anti-work perspective. These essays investigate concepts of freedom, compulsory labor, the 'work ethic', the wages system, employment, and 'occupations.'

"Less of a novel and more of an exploded manifesto, Days of War, Nights of Love might be just what we need. It is the type of book you'd thumb through in the store and actually want to buy (or steal)... Topics range from anarchy to hierarchy, work to sex, alienation to liberation and technology, but every page burns with a passion for a freer life... When you make it to the end, the personal testimonials about not working and the closing art pieces become an aria of voices urging you to close the book and live. Glorious, even for the most cynical reader. What more can we ask from a book?" - Clamor Magazine #6, Dec.00/Jan.01

"In the eighteen-nineties and for years thereafter, America reverberated with the name of the 'notorious Anarchist,' feminist, revolutionist and agitator, Emma Goldman. A Russian Jewish immigrant at the age of 17, she moved by her own efforts from seamstress in a clothing factory to internationally known radical lecturer, writer, editor and friend of the oppressed. ...a collection of her remarkably penetrating essays, far in advance of their time, originally published by the Mother Earth press which she founded."