New AK titles on sale!
Well, after a couple of months unintentional neglect (my computer broke and I can’t use a certain important program on my new one yet!!), we’re back to a rotating, randomly chosen selection of AK titles on sale for 50%. What says Happy New Year like that?! Returning readers may note that I have become a stickler for a to-the-penny discount, where before I’d say $8, now I’m all about the $7.97! I am weird, I cannot help it.
For the month of January, feast your eyes on these deals:
In Radical Priorities, editor C.P. Otero sets out to “provide relatively easy access to Chomsky’s libertarian philosophy and political analysis.” Taken from a wide variety of sources, many never widely published—some never in a book at all—and spanning four decades, the reader is furnished with a truly comprehensive window into Chomsky’s anarchist convictions. Convictions which, while ever-present in his analysis are left largely misunderstood or worseãignored. In seeking to combat the great challenges facing humanity, Chomsky’s analysis, and the traditions that bore it, must not be left in obscurity. Now $9.48!!
By William Herrick
Jumping the Line offers a vivid first-hand account of Left culture in America’s heady days of the 1920s through the 40s. William Herrick grew up in New York City with pictures of Lenin above his crib. He provides colorful reminiscences of riding the rails with other hobos during the Depression, of organizing Black sharecroppers in the South, of his time on the anarchist collective Sunrise Farm, where his political ideals of communal living and self-sufficiency were tested by the very real demands of agricultural work on a city boy, up through his tumultuous relationship with his employer, Orson Wells. The bulk of the book, however, focuses on Herrick’s involvement during the Spanish Civil War. Now $7.48!!
Wasting Libby: The True Story of How the WR Grace Corporation Left a Montana Town to Die
By Andrea Peacock
Wasting Libby chronicles the heart-wrenching story of a small Montana town where the W.R. Grace & Company (of A Civil Action) ran a vermiculite mine that supplied the world with insulation, fireproofing,
and gardening materials for nearly 30 years. But Grace’s vermiculite was laced with a virulent form of asbestos, and in its quest for profits the company betrayed this rural community, spreading a legacy of death and disease from northwestern Montana to the World Trade Center, through more than 35 million buildings in the United States estimated to have been insulated with Grace’s lethal ore. Libby’s story, which culminates in the 2009 criminal trial of the corporation’s executives, is ultimately the tale of the families who fought Grace for justice, who refused to sacrifice their dignity even as they lost their lives. Now $7.97!!
Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigation, Collective Theorization
Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber
What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change? In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic authors and engaged intellectuals—including Antonio Negri and Colectivo Situaciones—provide some challenging answers. In the process, they redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself. Now $10.98!!
Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century
Edited by Chris Spannos
What if we had direct control over our daily lives? What if society’s defining institutions—those encompassing economics, politics, kinship, culture, community, and ecologyãwere based not on competition, individual ownership, and coercion, but on self-management, equity, solidarity, and diversity? Real Utopia identifies and obliterates the barriers to an egalitarian, bottom-up society, while convincingly outlining how to build it. Instead of simply declaring “another world is possible,” the writers in this collection engage with what that world would look like, how it would function, and how our commitments to just outcomes is related to the sort of institutions we maintain. Now $10.98!!
Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces
By Raúl Zibechi
Raúl Zibechi is one of Latin America’s leading political theorists and we are proud to have published his first book translated into English. Dispersing Power is a historical analysis of social struggles in Bolivia and the forms of community power instituted by that country’s indigenous Aymara. This book, like the movements it describes, explores new ways of doing politics beyond the state, gracefully mapping the “how” of revolution, offering valuable lessons to activists and new theoretical frameworks for understanding how social movements can and do operate independently of state-centered models for social change. Now $7.97!!