We are proud to present you with the trailer for the excellent new release from AK Press Video: Shutdown: The Rise and Fall of Direct Action to Stop the War
[Note: please wait 10 seconds for the video to begin]
Anarchist participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 remains one of the most complicated, inspiring, and troubling moments in the history of anti-authoritarian activism. Even today, more than seven decades later, historians and militants continue to study and debate the events.
One such person is Stuart Christie, a longtime anarchist, whose recent book, We, The Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist federation (FAI) 1927-1937, attempts to answer key questions about the fate of the anarchist movement, while also bringing alive some of the drama of the times.
I asked Christie to tell me a little about his book in January of this year. What follows is a transcript of our exchange.
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Please describe your book and its main thesis.
We, The Anarchists is an attempt to set the record straight about the true nature of what become one of the most vilified anarchist organizations of all time—the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, better known by its initials—the FAI. I also try to show, by using the historical example of the anarcho-syndicalist labor union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the FAI, how anarchists and anarchist organizations are equally subject to the process of institutionalization and what the German sociologist Robert Michels described as “Iron law of oligarchy” as any other social groupings.
“It is organization,” Michels wrote, “that gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandatories over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization says oligarchy.”
We, The Anarchists outlines the evolution of the anarchist movement in Spain and its relationship to the wider labor movement, while providing insights into the main ideas which made the Spanish labor movement one of the most revolutionary of modern times. It also addresses, from an anarchist perspective, the problem of understanding and coping with change in the contemporary world: how can ideals survive the process of institutionalization?
In your view, why was it important to write the book?
The Iberian Anarchist Federation has been demonized both by the right and the authoritarian left, and in turn lionized by the anarchist movement. I thought it was time to set the record straight. There are also many important lessons to be learned from the history of the FAI and the CNT.
As I mentioned, anarchist groups and organizations are as subject as any other grouping to the process of oligarchization, whether or not they achieve their short or long term objectives, and this is precisely why the CNT’s ad hoc defense committees, made up of the core anarchist rank-and-file, consistently refused to accept any administrative position within the union. They understood only too well the corrupting nature of power, even on the highest-minded of comrades; their role, as they saw it, was to ensure that the union and its “notable leaders” remained firmly tied to the union’s founding anarchist principles and its revolutionary objective of establishing libertarian communism at the earliest possible opportunity.
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As we mentioned in a previous post, AK is holding a screening of Shutdown: The Rise and Fall of Direct Action to Stop the War. It’s going to be a great event and we hope that you will join us (and the filmmakers!) for the official release celebration of this new DVD from AK Press Video!
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Friday, January 30th: Screening of Shutdown: The Rise and Fall of Direct Action to Stop the War
Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Street, San Francisco
7PM, Free
On March 20, 2003—the day after the (most recent) Iraq war started—San Francisco was brought to a grinding halt by thousands of activists who occupied the streets to oppose the war. It was a mass uprising that forced the police to declare the financial district “shut down.” The planning and outreach coordinated by Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW), filled downtown San Francisco with approximately 15,000 people clogging traffic, stopping business as usual, communicating with passersby, and creating a pandemonium that lasted for several days. But neither DASW nor the mass resistance outlasted Iraq’s occupation.
Shutdown is an action-packed documentary chronicling how DASW successfully organized effort to shut down a major US city and how they failed to effectively maintain the organization to fight the war machine and end the occupation of Iraq.
Created by organizers involved with DASW, Shutdown combines detailed information on organizing for a mass action, critical interviews on organizing pitfalls, and the wisdom of hindsight. It is a must-see film for those engaged in the continuous struggle toward social justice.
We thought people might be interested in having a behind-the-scenes peek at the things that go on at AK Press. (It’s not all as glamorous as you’d imagine!) What follows is a little window into the world of publishing at AK Press. I (Zach) will try to give occasional updates that will give you folks an idea of what sort of things we do in order to work with the book trade.
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AK Press is both a publisher and a distributor. For books that we publish, we use another distributor to 
handle direct distribution to booksellers and wholesalers: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, who are based in Minneapolis. We’ve been with them for about eight years. The publishing world has two “seasons,” Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter, and for Consortium these are from April–August and September–March. Each January and July we begin the process of announcing books for the following season. We’ve got a number of deadlines coming up in the next five weeks, including tipsheets (which function as a quick reference sheet for each book); a sales call (where we try to excite the crew at Consortium with our latest foray into anarchist publishing. “Honest, it’ll sell!”); then descriptions and cover art for Consortium’s seasonal catalogs; and shortly afterward, the sales conference, where we put on our chinos and penny loafers and WOW the sales reps. All of this, at least six months before the season’s first books are ready.
One benefit of jumping through all of these hoops so early is that we’re organized to put together our own catalogs. In recent years, AK has been releasing between three and five catalogs of its own each year (geared towards stores, individuals, or libraries and professors) and it’s a big help to have all the copy written and front cover images available for those.
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| The following essay attempts to come to terms with the brief occupation of the New School for Social Research that occurred late last December. Q. Libet is the author of the text, which was included in a pamphlet that the Inoperative Committee circulated online. |
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Someone stands on a table and yells, “This is now occupied.” And that’s how it begins.
I. Days and nights of conspiracies beforehand, materials in waiting, meetings folded within meetings, tension dripping like sweat from the palms of individuals who a week earlier never believed they’d be at the front of the barricades in their very own school. A panopticon of consumption and labor turned into a zone of offensive opacity. Identities that clouded our communication evaporate before our eyes and we see each for the first time as not who we are but how we exist. Adverbs replace both nouns and adjectives in the grammar of this human strike, where language is made to speak for the very first time without fear of atrophy.
An occupation is not a dinner party, writing an essay, or holding a meeting; it’s a car bomb. The university is our automobile, that vehicular modem of pure alienation, transporting us not outwards across space but inwards through time. If our goal is the explosion of time, then occupation is our dynamite. We use our spaces and bodies as bombs and shields in this conflict with no name. Indiscernible, we sever the addiction to visibility that only guarantees our defeat. Thought has no image, and neither shall we. Shards of words bounce off inoperative objects and reverberate through the occupied halls, telling a story of accomplished impossibilities and undecidable victories.
II. The university shall never again be merely the lukewarm appendage to civil society that our (hypo)critical theorists so highly acclaim; rather, as our friends in Greece have shown, the university can also be an appendage to civil war, a space in which impenetrable bodies and inflammable knowledges can conspire towards the dissolution of their very condition, that is, separation. Yet it is exactly that sharing between life and thought that is preemptively banned from the territories marked under the sign “university.” Such territories betray their innocence not only in their concrete unfolding, but in their very name.
There is nothing “universal” about the university anymore except the universality of emptiness. Students and professors spend their waking lives covering up this void with paltry declarations and predictable nonactions. The void should no longer be avoided; it should be unleashed.
Seceding from the university is no longer enough. One must bring it down as well.
III. The New School for Social Research, that walking archive of decay, lives off the consumption of potential threats to its own institutional perpetuation. The labor of knowledge that fills journals, books and classrooms produces a social catalogue of investment opportunities for the managers of capital and the administrators of security. Every insight into the structure of social life produced therein is formulated as a proposal for modifications in the measurements of our prison walls. This activity of producing novel recommendations for the continued submission of the population is called critique.
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As announced in a previous post, AK Press is “Indie Press of the Month” at Modern Times bookstore in San Francisco. Our first event there, a party that featured brief talks by current and forthcoming AK authors, happened last Friday. Authors offered overviews of their work as well as praise for (and occasional humorous jabs at) AK. Wine flowed freely and MCs Annie Danger (of Modern Times), Ashley, Jose, and Macio (all of AK) did a great (and very funny) job.
Although none of us had the foresight to bring a camera, Jose had his trusty iphone. Here are a few pics:
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Chris Carlsson, editor of Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration and author of Nowtopia. |
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Diana Block, author of the forthcoming (in March) Arm the Spirit: A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back. |
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Rachel Herzing and Isaac Ontiveros, both members of the Critical Resistance editorial collective that produced Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex. |
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David Solnit, co-editor (with his sister Rebecca Solnit) of the forthcoming Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle. |
Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing “Recommended Reading” series, we asked Laura Pulido, an activist scholar
and geographer at the University of Southern California, to share her thoughts with us about the best books on Los Angeles from a radical perspective. Pulido authored the very excellent Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical activism in Los Angeles and co-authored the forthcoming A Guide to the People’s History of LA (which you can get a taste of here).
This is what she told us:
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While Los Angeles has always attracted a good deal of attention, it wasn’t until the 1980s that it actually became a focus of serious study. While writers and scholars from many quarters began publishing on Los Angeles, several academics dubbed this growing body of work, “The LA School.” Although the title “the LA School” has generated plenty of debate, one of the indisputable central texts of this era is Mike Davis’s City of Quartz: excavating the future in Los Angeles (1991). This was one of the first books to offer a dramatically different historical perspective on Los Angeles. Not only does Davis attempt to tell history from the bottom-up, but he directly takes on the dominant economic, political, and cultural players in the city, writing very much within a noir tradition. Not since Carey McWilliams has Los Angeles received this kind of treatment. Another wonderful book is Gerald Horne’s The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1995). Horne is a committed historian who leaves no stone unturned in his detailed exploration of the Watts uprising. In addition, Horne provides a larger picture of the national and regional social forces that were impacting South LA, and a scathing critique of the Los Angeles Police Department and the City’s response to the civil unrest.
More recently, there have been a series of books which expand on this tradition. Perhaps not too surprisingly, some of the most radical scholarship continues to be focused on South Central. Joao Costa Vargas’s Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South Central Los Angeles (2006) examines different facets of African American life in South LA. Costa Vargas is an anthropologist who does an amazing job of treating his subjects with great respect and dignity. He doesn’t gloss over the ugly stuff, but manages to convey the deep humanity of all the people he writes about. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing Galifornia (2007) offers a different perspective by focusing on the macro-level economic and political forces shaping California (including Los Angeles) which have led to the development of the world’s largest prison system. Finally, if I may be so bold, I would like to include my own book, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical activism in Los Angeles (2006). In this book I examines the Third World Left in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s by comparing radical activism among Japanese Americans, African Americans, and Chicanas/os. Besides the focus on radical political activism among people of color, I also think its worthwhile for its comparative angle.
Scholars have continued generating a wealth of scholarship about Los Angeles – but these books are an excellent starting point for anyone interested in a critical take on the City of Angels.
Good news for those of you who have been asking about it: our printer now has Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. The book, the first of two volumes in the 
CounterPower series by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, should be in our warehouse in three weeks. These two books (the second volume will be titled Global Fire) reexamine anarchism’s democratic class politics, its vision of a decentralized planned economy, and its impact on popular struggles in five continents over the last 150 years. Schmidt and van der Walt trace anarchism’s lineage and contemporary relevance, outlining its insights into questions of race, gender, class, and imperialism. In the process, they significantly reframe the work of previous historians on the subject and, especially, question Marxist approaches to revolutionary theory and practice.
Below we offer a brief snippet from the Introduction of Black Flame, in which the authors outline the contours of their important, and exhaustive, project. And, following that, you can check out the book’s table of contents.
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Our Project
We want to look at the ideas and history of the broad anarchist tradition since it initially emerged. It is a tradition rich in ideas, and one that has had an enormous impact on the history of working-class and peasant movements as well as the Left more generally. While the broad anarchist tradition has received more attention in recent years due to the prominent role of anarchists in the “antiglobalisation” movement and the rebirth of significant syndicalist union currents, its ideas and history are not well known today. In many cases, a proper appreciation of the ideas and activities of the movement have been obscured by unsympathetic scholarship and media, but the problem goes deeper than that. Even sympathetic accounts often misunderstand the core ideas and underestimate the historical reach of the broad anarchist tradition.
In our two volumes, we will undertake several key tasks: challenging many commonly held views about anarchism and syndicalism, reexamining the ideas of the broad anarchist tradition, and synthesising a global history of the movement. In doing this, we are motivated in part by a concern with demonstrating that an understanding of the role of anarchism and syndicalism is indispensable to the understanding modern history. It is simply not possible to adequately understand the history of, for instance, unions in Latin America or peasant struggles in East Asia without taking anarchism and syndicalism seriously. The history of the broad anarchist tradition is an integral—but often forgotten—part of popular and socialist history. Besides, it is a fascinating body of thought and history.
Although most of the literature on Latin American anarchism focuses on Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, it would be a mistake to think that anarchists only had an impact on those countries. Indeed, anarchists have played an important role throughout the Americas, even if historians have been slow to note their contributions.
Fortunately, the gaps in the historical record have been growing smaller and smaller over recent years thanks to the efforts of a new generation of historians who are dedicated to uncovering lost moments of the tradition. The new (Spanish language) book by Felipe del Solar and Andrés Pérez, Anarquistas: Presencia libertaria en Chile is a case in point.
This book provides a sweeping overview of Chilean anarchism from the turn of the twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first century, with ample chapters on the intervening decades documenting anarchist encounters with dictatorship, exile, and radical culture, to name a few of the topics explored.
Large portions of the book are available here. And you can purchase it through the publisher here.
The date has been set! The third annual New York City Anarchist Book Fair will take place on Saturday, April 11, 2009 at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. Like previous years, it will offer a great opportunity to meet with comrades old and new, participate in panels, and of course pick up loads of great books (including ones from AK Press!). For more information, please visit this site: http://anarchistbookfair.net/
The tenth annual Montreal Anarchist Book Fair will take place on May 16-17, 2009, a little more than a month later. It will be held at the CEDA, an adult education and community center in southwest Montreal, a short two minute walk from the Lionel-Groulx metro station. More than 100 booksellers, distributors, and groups from all over Montreal, Quebec, North America, and beyond will share their publications and materials in the main Book Fair auditorium. For more information, go here: http://www.anarchistbookfair.ca/en/node/64*