Durty Books
Durty Books is an independent publishing house by graphic designer Victoria Brunetta and artist Kate O’ Shea. The first release is entitled Durty Words.
“Durty Words is an invitation to make a space for dialogue, solidarity, resistance and creation through the medium of print. In 2016, we began the journey of making this book by asking people to respond to the relevance of Anarchist thought today. The title alludes to the fact that anarchism, along with other theories and practices that seek alternatives to capitalism, are often misunderstood. There are fractures within how we organise for a better world; it is important to recognise these, and therefore we set out to create a space for debate that is built on respect. By bringing together 134 contributors from different backgrounds from all over the world, we aim to begin to map the resonances and dissonances across diverse social movements. In this time of great social injustice, protest is necessary, but there is more to resistance than protest. We are interested in the space that opens up when we create a platform for building alternatives to that which we protest.”
The second release of Durty Books is Direct Democracy, Context, Society, Individuality by Yavor Tarinski, edited by Eve Olney.
“If social activism is to realistically take on ‘the question of power’ it must be carried out from a knowing ‘holistic’ assault on all social spheres of society. This is the challenging premise that Yavor Tarinski proposes in this very timely ‘provocation to action’, Direct Democracy: Context, Society, Individuality. Tarinski traces the philosophical and political reasoning of works from Cornelius Castoriadis, Murray Bookchin, and others, in an almost pragmatically presented case for a radical direct democratic ‘organizational basis of our society’. He applies a considered focus on the ‘contextuality’ of historical as well as existing examples of direct democracy as ‘tests’ to his argument that explicitly recognizes the complex interrelationship between the individual and society. The book concludes with an open-ended sense of persistence in realizing the kinds of institutions we need to reinstitute and collectively claim power over.” Eve Olney.
