Andrej Grubačić

Political activism, anarchist theory and anarchist pedagogy

Grubačić co-founded the Global Balkans network of the Balkan anti-capitalist diaspora, the Yugoslav Initiative for Economic Democracy, Kontrapunkt (magazine), and ZBalkans–a Balkan edition of Z Magazine. He is or has been active as an organizer in networks such as the post-Yugoslav coalition of anti-authoritarian collectives DSM!, Peoples Global Action, the World Social Forum, Freedom Fight and as a program director for the Global Commons.He is a member of Retort collective, a collective of radical intellectuals based in the Bay Area. As an anarchist educator, Grubačić travels around North America giving talks, lectures and workshops. He taught about anarchist education at Z Media Institute in Boston. He is a member of Bound Together Books in San Francisco, a collectively run anarchist bookstore. He is active with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies). He is involved with the mutual aid project with five prisoners on death row from Lucasville Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. He wrote about the 1993 Lucasville rebellion, when 450 Lucasville prisoners, including an unlikely alliance of the Aryan Brotherhood and Gangster Disciples, rioted and took over the facility for 11 days.

Academic career

Following the collapse of Yugoslavia, Grubačić left for the United States. He moved to Binghamton University where he participated in research working groups at the Fernand Braudel Center on anarchist implications of world-systems analysis. In 2008 he moved to San Francisco and worked in the sociology department at the University of San Francisco and urban studies department at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is now a Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology and Social Change Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His interest in world systems analysis and anarchist anthropology has influenced his research perspective, which includes experiences of self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual aid on the world-scale. His ongoing research on exilic spaces in the modern capitalist world system considers how spatial expressions of concentrated mutual aid are produced and reproduced on the outside/inside of capitalist civilization. Exilic spaces and practices refer to liminal and non-state areas relatively autonomous from capitalist valorization and state control. His principal research focus is on the autonomous "cracks" peopled by Don Cossacks, Atlantic pirates, Macedonian Roma, Jamaican Maroons and Mexican Zapatistas. This research is included in his UC Press book Living at the Edges of Capitalism His other research interests include labor history, militant research, and activist ethnography

Publications

In 2006, Grubacic teamed up with activist and historian Staughton Lynd to write the book Wobblies and Zapatistas

He went on to edit The Staughton Lynd Reader, and offer a new programmatic proposal for the "libertarian socialism for the 21st century," inspired by Lynd's work.

As of 2010, his most recent political book is Don't Mourn, Balkanize! Essays After Yugoslavia, published in 2010 by PM Press.

His most recent academic work is "Living at the Edges of Capitalism written with the Irish sociologist Denis O'Hearn.

His other works include books in Balkan languages, chapters and numerous articles related to the history and utopian present of the Balkans, anarchism, and radical sociology. As of 2009 Grubačić has started work on a book developing an anarchist version of world-systems analysis with David Graeber.

Grubacic is a Professor and Department Chair at CIIS California Institute of Integral Studies, and until recently the University of San Francisco. Grubačić also works as a guest host of the KPFA radio program Against the Grain.

Selected books

Articles

Reviews of Wobblies and Zapatistas

Wobblies and Zapatistas recounts a radical history and connects activist political movements and generations.

Global capitalism has suffered a major blow in the past year, the largest economic turmoil since the 1930s fuelling political discussions on possible alternatives to the current economic model. For those seeking alternatives to mainstream historical narratives, Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History is an important read. Spanning from the Cold War to the 1990s expansion of market-driven free-trade policies, this engaging book offers critical historical reflections on events that have shaped contemporary politics.

The World Social Forum, in its near decade of existence, has popularized the slogan "Another World Is Possible." Although many on the left may agree, and there is broad agreement about the nature of the world we live in and the shape of the one we wish to create, there is less agreement on how to create that new world. Wobblies and Zapatistas, a conversation of sorts between longtime anarchist activist Grubacic and Staughton Lynd, who for the last 40 years has been one of the iconic figures of the U.S. left, is a contribution to resolving that argument—or at least turning it into a productive discussion.

More theoretical and frankly meandering is Wobblies and Zapatistas,... The conversation starts out with the Chiapas rebellion and the Industrial Workers of the World—"the Zapatistas of yesteryear," in Lynd’s phrase—but makes brief stops with the community organizing efforts of former steelworkers in post-industrial Youngstown, the 1946 general strike in Oakland, the Vietnam-era antiwar movement, and the 1980s revolutionary upsurges of Central America. Lynd ties it all together with his concept of "accompaniment"—basically, throwing one’s lot in with oppressed, sharing the burdens and risks of their struggles.

This volume brings together two radical intellectuals from alternative political traditions for an extended conversation about theory, activism, and the state of radical politics today. Throughout their conversation, Staughton Lynd, the civil rights organizer, antiwar activist, lawyer, and radical historian, responds to the probing questions of Andrej Grubacic, the radical sociologist and activist from the Balkans.

Reviews of Don't Mourn, Balkanize!

This is a splendid time for the North American reader to meet the extraordinary Andrej Grubacic. After something of a letdown following the Seattle 1999 events– including what many of us perceived as an ideology-driven sectarian turn–anarchists are back in the news with the Occupations. No, not the anarchism of Bakunin or even Bookchin, but anarchism in a new key as well as a new generation, more practical and more open.

When this writer worked in Kosovo, attempts to interview people from the small community of Serbs that remained there after the European Union took over the city almost invariably failed...Mr. Grubačić also proposes what he calls a “balkanization from below, a pluricultural concept in which, however, rejects that of the European Union.” In this idea, Balkan people need to “find the strength and orientation for a new politics for another Balkans. It should be a politics of a Balkan Federation. A participatory society, built from the bottom up, through struggles for the creation of an inclusive democratic awareness, participatory social experiments, and an emancipatory practice that would win the political imagination of all people in the region.”

Andrej Grubačić is probably the most radical writer to approach the Balkans. He does so from an anarchist perspective, and his ideas are informed by both his background and his politics. Although he is from Belgrade, which is now the capital of Serbia, he continues to think of himself as Yugoslav, despite the fact that Yugoslavia no longer exists as a country. This paradox of identity illustrates the difficulties that the changing political landscape of the Balkans have caused for people from the region.

Don't Mourn, Balkanize! is divided into two main sections—on balkanization from above and balkanization from below—both chronologically organized and both revolving around the same themes: the politics of exclusion, intervention, and resistance, within and beyond the Balkans, but especially in Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo.