Chilean comrades have organized an exciting month of workshops on the theory and practice of anarchism. Topics include: introduction to anarchism, anarchist history and research methods, eco-anarchism, libertarian pedagogy, and more! Workshops meet every weekday and the entire program begin this Saturday, March 7, in Santiago.
It’s going to be a great month of dialogue, strategy, and friendship, For more information (in Spanish), please visit this website: http://www.marzoanarquista.org/
Last July, AK author Terence Kissack gave a great presentation at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender Historical Society in San Francisco. It was based on his book, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917. Terence, who used to be the Executive Director of GLBTHS, is a wonderful, engaging, and humorous speaker, and we’ve been eagerly waiting for his talk to become available online. You can check it out below: it’s an hour-long examination (in six parts) of the historical legacy of anarchists’ defense of the right to enter into same-sex partnerships free from social and governmental restraints. Afterwards, you should visit the GLBTHS web site and, if you’re in the bay area, stop by Passionate Struggle, an exhibit based on their extensive archives. Enjoy!
At AK, we always love to learn about new and forthcoming publications. Here are two that we recently stumbled upon that we found particularly exciting:
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Comrades from Los Angeles have just released the first issue of the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities / Comunidades Autonomas Revolucionarias zine, which looks great and, among other articles, contains a political statement from the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities group, information on Cop Watch Los Angeles, and a piece on the healing properties of various foods.
You can download it (in English and Spanish) by following the links on this page.
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Also exciting is the following call for submissions:
[[[ CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS TO “BLACK RIM” ]]]
About the Project: Black Rim is a new radical project, an occasional publication whose goal is to establish and strengthen the ties between anti-capitalists, anarchists, libertarian communists, and friends in the Pacific Rim (Asia, Australia, and the west coast of the Americas) region. The project emerges out of our realization that the forces of capital and imperialism are shifting their attention to the Pacific Rim region, yet the local communities of resistance to those powers are not connected to or cognizant of one another. In other words, the core of the World System is moving to East Asia and we want to support the opposition to that move. We do this not out of a desire to keep capital in Europe or North America or to maintain “First World” hegemony, but to weaken capital’s power globally and to build better worlds.
We hope to provide useful content to our friends in struggle: everything from overviews of different projects being undertaken across the region, to report-backs from local actions or meetings, to media reviews, prisoner support information, and other news stories. We also would like to cover issues like globalization, migration, anarchism, and history.
The magazine will hopefully publish in many different languages.
About the Call for Submissions:
Our publication would love to receive the following from you:
* If you have an anarchist or anti-capitalist project in Asia, Australia, or the west coast of the Americas which travelling people can visit, we would like your contact information
* Independent investigative reports on issues or movements relevant to our causes
* Interviews with radicals in Asia
* Translated works on anarchism, feminism, queer theory, international solidarity, and working-class culture that were originally written in an Asian language
* Histories of resistance to capitalism, empire, and other forms of systematic oppression
Additionally, help with translation from and into Asian languages would be greatly appreciated.
Please limit all submissions to 500 words.
Please submit all entries by March 1st, 2009 to: kangdengming@riseup.net
For additional information or to provide feedback, please write to the above address.
The nice folks at Feminist Review recently reviewed AK’s Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex. They’ve actually reviewed quite a few AK titles over time…but that’s not why you should check out their site. You should check it out because they’re a collective of ten editors and 200 writers who review books, music, DVDs, and more from, as they put it, “feminist perspectives to explore the world through an anti-oppression lens.”
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For those of us who did not make it to Critical Resistance’s tenth anniversary conference, Abolition Now! is one way to bring the discourse and vision of Critical Resistance to our own lives and work. The anthology includes nineteen pieces broken into three sections: Dismantle, Change, and Build. The pieces vary from interviews with organizers and analysis from scholar-activists, to poems and reflections on current movements and state of the prison-industrial complex (PIC). The selections highlight many important debates and dilemmas within movements for prison abolition and lay out different strategies and visions.
There isn’t a weak piece in the collection, although every reader will surely take away something different. I thought that Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas’ “COPS and the Visual Economy of Punishment” was particularly interesting, and an aspect of the workings of the PIC that is often ignored. She argues that punishment and criminalization of black and brown bodies is normalized in television shows like COPS and other media. Although she does not argue it, the implications of her argument should lead organizers to pay attention to culture as an important site of struggle, and strategize ways of taking power in the media to de-normalize and reveal these processes.
I also thought that Martha Escobar’s piece, “No One is Criminal” was an important addition, calling attention to the ways that immigrant rights movements have also contributed to the criminalization of black people. There is a tendency among the progressive left to overlook the shortcomings of other progressive movements because of “good intentions.” Escobar does not fall into this trap, and strengthens both movements by calling attention to these consequences.
While each piece has its own value, the several pieces on the struggles of current organizations in particular places, such as the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Frye Societies, the LEAD Project in Los Angeles, and UBUNTU in Durham, North Carolina are extremely valuable in grounding the book in the lived work and experience of organizers (incarcerated and not), and the visions emerging form their work. All in all, the anthology serves an important purpose in cataloging the ideas and experience of a range of organizers and scholar-activists to share with the wider movement against the prison-industrial complex.
We hope to see you at the 14th Annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair on March 14, 2009! It’s sure to be a great event! For information about the book fair, please visit this site. And, when you’re there, please stop by AK’s table and say hello!
One of the great things about dealing with marketing & publicity for AK Press is having the chance to work with authors who are really excited about promoting their books and staying up-to-date on what’s going on with social and political struggles here in the U.S. and across the globe. Sitting here thinking about stuff to feature on the AK Press blog, it occurred to us that lots of AK authors have blogs of their own—devoted to everything from radical parenting to black politics to social struggles in Latin America, and beyond! So here’s a list of some fantastic sites by AK authors that we read frequently—it’s not exhaustive, by any means, and we’d sure love to know if there are other ones we should include on this list!
A blog devoted to news about radical parenting by super-cool activist and musician mom Jessica Mills, author of the book of the same name, published by AK in 2007.
Great blog devoted to the politics of race and class, by Kevin Gray, one of the strongest critical voices in today’s Black left, and the author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics, published just a few months ago by AK Press/Counterpunch.
Not quite the same thing as a blog, but as a full-time Z-staffer and a Z-net editor, Chris Spannos, editor of Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century, is a prolific poster on the site, and the archive of his posts and other comments and musings is well-worth checking out!
The collective blog of the JustSeeds Radical Artists Cooperative—absolutely fantastic blog filled with deliciously entrancing images, news and views about the world of radical politics, and announcements of events taking place all over the country. JustSeeds members Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland are frequent contributors to the blog, and are the co-authors of the beautiful AK Press book Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority.
Your niche-free journey through matters of urgent interest! The blogospheric home of Brian Awehali, writer, designer, commentator, and editor of AK’s Tipping the Sacred Cow, an anthology that collects the best of the now-defunct, but still legendary, LiP Magazine (which Brian founded and edited up to the very last issue in 2006). An excellent source for commentary on issues in the news, ranging from politics to science, to urban studies to transportation and beyond.
Aaaand, there’s many more that haven’t been updated in a while … which we won’t post here. But let us know if we’ve missed any AK author blogs—or if you’re an AK author and this post inspires you to start blogging again, write us to let us know that you’ve been updating your site!
In celebration of Black History Month, AK Press is having a 10-day web sale! From Thursday, February 12 through Sunday, February 22, ALL ITEMS ON OUR WEBSITE will be 20% off the list price!
Please note: subscriptions to Friends of AK Press and gift certificates are not eligible for sale pricing. Only one discount per order. Our website cannot automatically apply discounts, so your credit card will be PREAUTHORIZED for the full amount but we will subtract 20% before actually charging your card. The preauthorization will disappear after a couple of days. Please place your order before 11:59PM (PST) on Sunday, February 22 to take advantage of sale pricing.
The ILWU has long been one of—if not the—most consistently militant labor unions in the United States. Since 1933 it has walked the talk of the old Wobbly slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all,” organizing not only across but against racial and ethnic divisions, refusing to load ships bound for Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa when the U.S. still supported those regimes, striking against imperialist wars and in solidarity with political prisoners, and practicing militant solidarity with other workers around the world and here in the belly of the capitalist beast.
No, it is not an anarchist organization. But it is an effective and militant working class organization, and uses direct action and its labor power at the heart of an essential global industry to achieve real results on behalf of its member workers and oppressed and exploited people worldwide. It also continues to practice one of the better examples of democracy and local autonomy within the American labor movement. If the measure of a person, or a group of people, is in what they do and not what they say are, then the ILWU are worthy allies for all radicals seeking to actively challenge capitalism and its disastrous consequences.
Local 10 in San Francisco has long been at the heart of this radicalism. As the local at the epicenter of the 1934 General Strike in San Francisco, in which striking workers were gunned down by cops, to this day it bars police from membership(!). It was Local 10’s Jack Heyman who stood up to riot cops at a demo to block the shipment of war materiel to Iraq in 2003, and faced (and thankfully beat) serious charges as a result. I first met Jack years before on an airplane as he was on his way to speak to sympathetic trade unionists in Turkey about the Mumia Abu-Jamal case. That sympathy evaporated when he connected the oppression of Black people in the U.S. to that of the Kurdish minority in Turkey, and he was asked to leave. It is this kind of consistency and guts of many individual ILWU’s that helps maintain the union’s reputation as a model of active, effective militancy.
The ILWU is honoring national Black history month this February 14 at the Local 10 Hall, once again connecting struggles for freedom and justice, past and present, locally and abroad, as one struggle with many battles. From defending the freedom and work of blacklisted radicals such as Paul Robeson and Angela Davis, to defending the lives of Troy Davis and Mumia Abu-Jamal, to protesting police murders such as the recent execution of Oscar Grant in Oakland, these are battles that the ILWU not only calls attention to, but actually fights.
So come out and support them in their efforts on behalf of our collective struggles for a better world, and make some new friends and allies in the process.
It’s been almost twenty years since AK Press was organized as a formal workers’ cooperative in Scotland. The cooperative survived those lean(er) early years due to the youthful energy of its founders, especially Ramsey Kanaan, and the support of anarchists throughout the UK, who were eager to see our ideas flourish.
In 1994, Ramsey moved to the Bay Area to start a new US branch. At that time, AK Press had offices in Edinburgh and London. The latter is now officially closed, but a former collective member there still does a lot of support work. Ever since, the US and UK branches have operated their own distribution networks—that aren’t tied financially, or otherwise—and collaborated on publishing projects as one big collective. Every year (missing only a couple in 14 years), we all get together for our Annual General Meeting (AGM) to discuss business, the state of the movement, and, most importantly, upcoming publishing projects, prospects, and wishlists. The original idea was that each year we’d rotate host countries, but that plan was jettisoned (shortly after I joined the collective, boo-hoo) as the US collective grew and the UK offices shrank slightly. We now host AGMs in the Bay Area.
Well, after all these years I finally had a chance to visit Lex and Mike on their home turf. Lorna and I spent a few days at AKUK last week to catch up on collective goings on, drink fine Scottish ale, and tour their luxurious offices. Lex has been a part of AK Press since its formation as a workers’ cooperative and Mike has been on for more than a decade. As you can see from the photos, they have the same dedication to a tidy work environment as their American comrades!
Most recently the UK offices produced Benjamin Franks’s Rebel Alliances and Volume One of An Anarchist FAQ. They are currently working on AFAQ Vol. Two and are in the initial stages of mapping out a new Proudhon reader with Iain McKay.
Comrades from Los Angeles have just released the first issue of the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities / Comunidades Autonomas Revolucionarias zine, which looks great and, among other articles, contains a political statement from the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities group, information on Cop Watch Los Angeles, and a piece on the healing properties of various foods.
