Posted on March 31st, 2011 in Events, Uncategorized
It’s time to pause for a minute, think about the city and the world we want to live in, celebrate all we’ve done and make plans for what comes next. It’s time to take inspiration from each other and make connections. It’s time to build bridges in and across our fractured city and our disparate movements. And it’s time to read a few good books.
On April 15th-17th, the Toronto Anarchist Bookfair will be putting forward new theories and kick-starting them into practice with a weekend of workshops, actions, speakers, conversations, new friends, festivities, books and zines.
There will be a community dinner and speaking event on Friday evening. Bookfair tabling will be from 10am–6pm on Saturday and Sunday.
The Toronto Anarchist bookfair will be held at Steelworkers’ Hall, a barrier-free venue with accessible washrooms. Attendant care, childcare, and food will be available.
Posted on March 25th, 2011 in Uncategorized
Here at AK, we are full of surprises. Heck, we surprise ourselves sometimes with the amount of crazy and awesome publishing projects we take on in any given period of time. Did I mention that AK Press published 21 titles in 2010? And that we have another 21 on the docket for 2011? I’ll save that for a future blog post …
For now, let me tell you about our latest awesome new book that you probably haven’t heard about! It’s a new edition of Paul Lafargue’s The Right to be Lazy, edited by Inkworks collective member emeritus Bernard Marszalek, and including a number of other essays by Lafargue, as well as contributions from Wobbly organizer Fred Thompson and labor journalist Kari Lydersen. here’s the really sweet part of the deal: not only is this great new book now a part of the AK Press publishing catalogue (with a swanky new cover), it’s also a co-publishing project with The Charles H. Kerr Company, the nation’s oldest continuously running labor publisher, founded in Chicago in 1886 by Charles Hope Kerr, and helmed today by the incomparable Penelope Rosemont, one of the co-founders of the Chicago Surrealist Group. This is the first of a series of co-publishing projects we’ll be doing with the Kerr Company in the coming months (and hopefully years). The next is a new edition of Franklin Rosemont & David Roediger’s Haymarket Scrapbook due out this November … but more on that later!
“The Right to be Lazy,” the biting, sarcastic, screed against overwork written by the flamboyant Cuban-born son-in-law of Karl Marx, has a long history with the Kerr Company (Charles Kerr himself made the first translation of the essay into English in 1906), and we’re excited to be a part of this latest chapter in that history. The new edition is a collaboration between three collective/cooperative projects: Kerr Company, AK Press, and Bay-area print collective Inkworks. You should check it out! And you should also check out the blog that editor Bernard Marszalek has out together to promote the book, where he’s promising to post every day! (Bernard: you are a better man than I! If only I could manage to post every day … !)
I asked Bernard to take a minute and write a post on the history of the Kerr Company edition of the essay, and to reflect on why the book is particularly relevant today. I really encourage you to pick up the book which includes a longer introduction from Bernard addressing some of these issues in greater detail! But for now, here’s a little moment of movement publishing history to pique your interest …
The story behind The Right to be Lazy, by Bernard Marszalek
In the 60s, when I belonged to Chicago’s Solidarity Bookshop crew of anarchists, surrealists and Wobblies, we distributed all the copies we could find of the rare, 1906, C. H. Kerr edition of Paul Lafargue’s The Right to be Lazy. To meet an increasing demand for the essay, we decided to reprint it in 1969 while I was a member of the J.S. Jordan Co-op Print shop. Jordan Co-op was a movement shop that printed most of the agitational literature distributed at the historic 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Tor Faegre, bookshop member and Polaris Action activist, designed a delightful cover and we sold out that edition quickly.
Later, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, as members of Solidarity Bookshop’s conspiracy against work, joined the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company and issued a new edition of The Right to be Lazy with Fred Thompson’s biographical essay of Lafargue. Thompson’s essay was the first extensive survey of Lafargue to appear in English. When I heard that edition, now twenty years old, was out-of-print I suggested reprinting his famous essay along with his lesser-known satiric writings. To round out the project, I added an introduction to bring his ideas into the 21st Century since they continue to challenge capitalism’s noxious core – wage slavery.
In the years since the 60s I have come to realize that Lafargue’s criticism of work only grow in relevancy. Fifty years ago, employment – as the glue that held society together – came under scrutiny by a wide range of opinion. Mainstream commentators anguished that work would disappear with the rise of automation, while dissidents, who I allied with, rejected work wholesale as a misuse of human and natural resources to simply perpetuate mindless consumption.
Today, I would argue that work has been displaced from the center of life by pursuits of material and spiritual satisfactions. This does not mean that I think work has receded into insignificance, especially for the unemployed, but that jobs have ceased, for most, to dominate lives as they did with previous generations. Company towns, for instance, have disappeared from the American landscape (to reappear in distant lands), along with their industrial armies; more importantly, the personal stake in one’s job has diminished directly as dissatisfaction with work increases. Those who doubt this have not seen the zombies shuffling off to their posts in the early morning light.
These views on working are not popular with those who oppose the capitalist system because it doesn’t “deliver the goods” – defined in the United States as the American Dream. Nor where they popular in Lafargue’s day when the promise of “sharing the wealth” Capital produced increasingly seduced the reformist leadership of the trade unions and the “tribunes of the people.”
The Right to be Lazy however remained popular with the workers. It has been reproduced and distributed more widely than any other Marxist text except the Manifesto. Its sardonic wit strikes the chords of rebellion that resonate down the long hall of satire.
Given the subversive content of this essay and the revolutionary politics of Lafargue, it is totally appropriate that the production of this volume makes use of labor that has taken one step out of the nexus of wage-slavery. The combined efforts of members of three worker-run collective ventures contributed to its realization. Starting with C.H. Kerr, whose 125 years of radical publishing history is commemorated in this book, to the collaboration of AK Press, the publishing and distribution group that moves into its 20th year of “fanning the flames of discontent,” and finally the material realization of the book is due to the fine printing in Berkeley by Inkworks Press, a worker-run union print shop established in 1974, and where I am Member Emeritus.
Posted on March 23rd, 2011 in Uncategorized
Folks, we’ve been sitting on this news for a couple of weeks, waiting until everything was all set to go! We’re absolutely thrilled to announce a last-minute addition to our Spring publishing list: a new book of analysis on the revolt and crisis in Greece, edited by the fine folks at Occupied London, the theory & events blog we’ve turned to for up-to-the-minute reports on what’s happening in Greece.
We’ll be posting excerpts and a full table of contents online soon! Help us get the word out!
REVOLT AND CRISIS IN GREECE: BETWEEN A PRESENT YET TO PASS AND A FUTURE STILL TO COME
April 2011 | $18 · €10 · £10 | 378 pages | ISBN: 9780983059714
For more information, or to preorder: http://revoltcrisis.org | http://www.akpress.org
How does a revolt come about and what does it leave behind? What impact does it have on those who participate in it and those who simply watch it? Is the Greek revolt of December 2008 confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, or are there lessons we can bring to bear on social action around the globe?
Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come is a collective attempt to grapple with these questions. A collaboration between anarchist publishing collectives Occupied London and AK Press, this timely new volume traces Greece’s long moment of transition from the revolt of 2008 to the economic crisis that followed. In its twenty chapters, authors from around the world—including those on the ground in Greece—analyse how December became possible, exploring its legacies and the position of the social antagonist movement in face of the economic crisis and the arrival of the International Monetary Fund.
In the essays collected here, over two dozen writers offer historical analysis of the factors that gave birth to December and the potentialities it has opened up in face of the capitalist crisis. Yet the book also highlights the dilemmas the antagonist movement has been faced with since: the book is an open question and a call to the global antagonist movement, and its allies around the world, to radically rethink and redefine our tactics in a rapidly changing landscape where crises and potentialities are engaged in a fierce battle with an uncertain outcome.
Contributors include Vaso Makrygianni, Haris Tsavdaroglou, Christos Filippidis, Christos Giovanopoulos, TPTG, Metropolitan Sirens, Yannis Kallianos, Hara Kouki, Kirilov, Some of Us, Soula M., Christos Lynteris, Yiannis Kaplanis, David Graeber, Christos Boukalas, Alex Trocchi, Antonis Vradis, Dimitris Dalakoglou and the Occupied London Collective. Art and design by Leandros, Klara Jaya Brekke and Tim Simons. Edited by Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou of Occupied London.
Occupied London is an anarchist collective writing on all things urban. Since 2007, the collective has worked together to publish an irregular journal, offering a platform for discussion within the global social antagonist movement, and featuring contributions by writers and collectives from around the globe, including Nasser Abourahme, Zygmunt Bauman, Franco Berardi, Klara Jaya Brekke, Manuel Castells, Mike Davis, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Christos Filippidis, David Graeber, Richard Pithouse, Marina Sitrin, Antonis Vradis, and many, many more. Since 2008, the collective has maintained a wildly popular blog, “From the Greek Streets,” providing up-to-the-minute coverage of the urban revolt of December 2008 in Greece, and examining the impact and legacies of the revolt and the crisis that followed. (http://www.occupiedlondon.org | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog)
AK Press is a worker-run, democratically-managed publisher of anarchist and radical literature. Founded in 1990, AK Press is a ten-person collective of committed anarchists, spread between Oakland, Baltimore, and Edinburgh, working hard to publish more than twenty new titles each year, and distributing thousands of other titles from like-minded publishers around the globe. (http://www.akpress.org | http://revolutionbythebook.akpress.org)
Occupied London on Tour!
Editors Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou will tour North America this April! A full list of dates and locations is here: http://www.revoltcrisis.org/speaking-tour-n-america-april-2011/.
Additional events in the United Kingdom and in the European Union are being planned right now! Please email editorial@occupiedlondon.org if you want to host a stop on the tour!
A special appeal from AK Press and Occupied London to our friends and supporters: Spread the word!
As media-makers and propagandists for the wider anarchist and anatagonist movements worldwide, one of our responsibilities is to do our very best to make the voices of revolt and struggle heard around the globe. We consider this responsibility to be an honor and a privilege of the highest order. We try to plan our publishing schedule out many months in advance, so we can save and raise money to fund print runs, secure advance orders, and make sure that word gets out as widely as possible about all of our forthcoming titles! But from time to time, a project comes along that is special and timely enough to warrant working outside the normal channels of the book trade. Revolt and Crisis in Greece is one of those projects. Less than four weeks in production from start to finish, this collaboration between Occupied London and AK Press is an exciting last-minute addition to the AK Press publishing list (and to all of our publishing budgets!), so we’re depending on your advance orders to help us raise the money we need to cover the cost of printing!
We also need your help letting the world know about this exciting new project. If you have a blog, we encourage you to blog about the book. Newspapers, magazines, journals, and zines: please post announcements about the publication on your websites, or in print. Contact us about offering a special discount for your readers or subscribers! And, if you’re interested in writing a review of the book, or running an excerpt from the book, email publicity@akpress.org and we’ll work with you to arrange it. Forward this announcement far and wide. This book is an example of what happens when people collectivize and collaborate, and we need your help to make it a success!
Individual customers, preorder your copy from the AK Press website and get 25% off the US list price. Wholesale customers, we need your help too–and we’re offering a special 50% discount on any copies you preorder through AK Press Distribution (sales@akpress.org). Get your copies today, and please help us spread the word!
This title is distributed to the trade by AK Press Distribution, but like all AK Press books, you can also order Revolt and Crisis from most major wholesalers, from Amazon.com, and from your local independent bookstore! Whatever channel you choose, do get a copy, you won’t regret it. (And, Friends of AK worldwide will receive a copy in an upcoming Friends package!)
If you are in the UK, visit AK Press UK at http://www.akuk.com to order copies for individuals or for trade distribution. In the rest of the world, please order directly from Occupied London, at http://www.revoltcrisis.org.
To request a review copy, please email publicity@akpress.org. Wholesale customers, email sales@akpress.org for terms.
Posted on March 23rd, 2011 in Events, Happenings
AK Press joins some of our favorite Baltimore print projects for a weekend exhibition at Open Space
, for their second annual Publication & Multiples Fair! At 2720 Sisson Street, in Baltimore. Saturday & Sunday from noon – 6PM. Don’t miss it!!
Posted on March 23rd, 2011 in Events
Posted on March 18th, 2011 in About AK, AK News, Happenings, Uncategorized
As we head into the start of the Spring tabling season, it’s a busy weekend for the AK Baltimore crew! We have not one, but two out of town events this weekend, and many many more in the coming weeks …
As I type this, Suzanne and Jessica are currently packing up piles of books for the annual Left Forum Conference, held at the Pace University campus in New York City (and boasting some of the best graphic design that I’ve ever seen associated with this event – nice job folks!). Left Forum kicks off tonight, and the opening plenary is always great. This year’s opening night event includes Barbara Ehrenreich ( a personal favorite of mine! I just wish I could get her to come out and do an event in Baltimore), Cornel West (need I say more), Lara Flanders (of GRIT TV fame), and Paul Mason (the economics editor at BBC Newsnight). Weird combo, no? But still awesome!
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Over the course of the weekend Left Forum will host over 1,000 speakers on more than 250 panels. Seriously. It’s a huge progressive event, and we’re excited to be a part of it! AK authors holding down the anarchy fort in the middle of this Marxist mecca include Josh MacPhee, Cindy Milstein, David Porter, Ben Dangl, Andy Cornell, Chris Spannos, Marina Sitrin, Fred Ho, and probably many others who will (we hope) stop by the table and say “howdy”! And, Jessica and Suzanne will be there in the exhibition hall and at the panels to provide copies of our author’s books, plus hundreds of other speaker books that AK distributes (including a great selection of new titles from our friends at Feminist Press) and other ephemera.
But, before we get there, Suzanne and Jessica have to get it all packed and loaded into the car, which is a massive task considering that they have to cram enough books to fill out three tables into a Honda FIT.
Jessica (pictured here) is unthrilled by the fact that publishers (like AK Press!) make their books non-standard sizes, thus making the packing process all the more difficult.
Meanwhile, once they finish packing & loading, I’ll start packing up for my tabling gig this weekend: the First Annual Charlottesville Anarchist Bookfair, down in Charlottesville, VA, just three hours away from Baltimore. I’m excited! I don’t expect it to be a huge event, but I am all about supporting new anarchist bookfairs, especially ones in the mid-Atlantic, so as soon as I heard this event was in the works, I signed up to table. The event is a one-day affair, on Saturday, so I’m heading down tomorrow morning with folks from Red Emma’s, and we’ll be joining some of our pals from Justseeds, Intsitute for Experimental Freedom, Flying Brick Library, Crimethinc, Dream City Collective, and many other folks, outside in the midst of the Virginia Festival of the Book. Should be a blast!
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If you find yourself in New York this weekend, or if you happen to live in Virginia or the surrounding area, come out and visit us! We love tabling visitors, and, as always, we’ll be offering great deals and discount books at both events throughout the weekend.
Posted on March 17th, 2011 in About AK, AK Distribution
Yes, yes, the books arrived in Baltimore March 11. You’ve all seen the blog entry/facebook. More exciting we think (in Oakland anyway) is that the books arrived here today! That means we can fill your orders now! Despite the daunting news that we were getting three pallets, everything went smoothly, in large part because our driver, who is from Montreal, did not give even the teeny-tiniest shit about blocking the entire road, backing up right to our doors, so we could easily unload. What a star!
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Literally the best thing I’ve seen in a while. Except this:
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So without further ado I present you with Oppose and Propose and Property is Theft!, both 25% off for the next month, and shipping immediately! Don’t forget if you sign up for the Friends of AK program (everyone else’s is a poor imitation of our original!) this month, you’ll receive both of these little/big beauts!
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Posted on March 14th, 2011 in Events
Posted on March 14th, 2011 in AK Authors!
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Dancing With Dynamite
–An interview with Ben Dangl
By Angola 3 News
Benjamin Dangl, author of the new book Dancing With Dynamite (AK Press), was video-interviewed by Angola 3 News this week while visiting the San Francisco Bay Area, on tour with his book, which has been positively reviewed by a range of publications and writers, including Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, who proclaimed that “Ben Dangl breaks the sound barrier, exploding many myths about Latin America that are all-too-often amplified by the corporate media in the United States.”
Dangl has previously written The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007), and contributed to Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Latin American Issues (McGraw-Hill, 2006). He has written about politics and social issues in Latin America for The Guardian Unlimited, The Nation Magazine, The Progressive, Utne Reader, CounterPunch, Alternet, Common Dreams, Z Magazine, La Estrella de Panama and more. While currently teaching Latin American history and politics and globalization at Burlington College in Vermont, he also works as editor of the news websites: Upside Down World, focusing on politics and social movements in Latin America (founded by Dangl), and Toward Freedom, a progressive perspective on world events.
In Dancing With Dynamite’s introduction, Dangl writes that “this book deals with the dances between today’s nominally left-leaning South American governments and the dynamic movements that helped pave their way to power in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, and Paraguay. The discussion surrounding the question of changing the world through taking state power or remaining autonomous has been going on for centuries. The vitality of South America’s new social movements, and the recent shift to the left in the halls of government power, make the region a timely subject of study within this ongoing debate. Though often overlooked in contemporary reporting and analysis on the region, this dance is a central force crafting many countries’ collective destiny.”
Dangl feels that US activists can learn much from studying this “dance,” telling Angola 3 News that “because South American social movements have been so successful in the past decade, I think it is important to learn and understand what’s been successful and to apply those strategies and tactics here, where we are facing very similar challenges.” Because the political climate in the US today is different from Latin America in many ways, Dangl argues that “these strategies and tactics shouldn’t just be taken and applied directly to our communities, but should instead be considered and made useful in our own context and realities.”
In the interview, Dangl cites several different lessons for US activists, including the need to “create the kind of social relationships within our own social movements that reflect the kind of world that we are fighting for every day. That’s been useful for neighborhood councils in El Alto, Bolivia where people work together every day, whether it’s to build roads, soccer fields, or pressure a mayor for better access to electricity and water. These kinds of social relations within the family and neighborhoods help to create the capacity to mobilize road blockades and protests when that’s needed.”
There are also lessons here for US activists seeking to push President Obama and other politicians further to the left, as Dangl thinks the question of “how to fight against a relative ally in political office without empowering the right” has been “negotiated very successfully throughout South America.”
Fortunately, US activists have already been learning from their neighbors to the south. In the book’s introduction, Dangl cites several examples, including “the 2008 occupation of the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago which drew from tactics in Argentina, the movements for access to water in Detroit and Atlanta, which reflected tactics and struggles in Bolivia, and the Take Back the Land movement in Florida, which organized homeless people to occupy a vacant lot and pairs homeless families with foreclosed homes, mirroring the tactics and philosophy of the landless movement in Brazil.”
When asked for a closing thought at the end of our interview, Dangl emphasized the larger global struggle against oppression by arguing that Dancing With Dynamite’s lessons extend well beyond the US and Latin America. “With what’s happened in Egypt with the overthrow of Mubarak, and what is going on right now in Madison,Wisconsin with the fight for collective bargaining, I think these struggles are related in the sense that they’re all about political power. With these recent examples, there is a shift in power from the government office to the streets, and recognizing that is important today in the fight for social change. In Madison, activists say they’ve been really inspired by activists in Egypt. Recognizing these common oppressors & common systems of exploitation, and working for solutions together across borders is really a solution for making the world a better place.”
—Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.
original url: http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2011/03/dancing-with-dynamite-interview-with.html
Posted on March 11th, 2011 in AK News
Property is Theft, the gigantic Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology has just been delivered from the printer, and dropped off at our door here in Baltimore. Did I mention it’s gigantic? To answer the question “Why a Proudhon collection?”, editor Iain McKay blogged about it just this morning, giving some insight into his reasons for diving into this monumental project, some of the things he uncovered in the process, and the ways that the book changed along the way.
Check out Iain’s entire blog post here.
Now, after two years, I can look forward to getting the book in my hands. It has been time consuming but worth it. I think the book will transform the understanding of Proudhon’s ideas in the English speaking world. The new texts and the introduction should help expose the many, many distortions of his ideas that we have been subjected to for so long. It should also help our understanding of the development of anarchism in the 19th century, showing (at the very least) how indebted Bakunin was to Proudhon (as Daniel Guerin explained in one of his articles) and the links between mutualism (reformist anarchism, if you like) and the revolutionary anarchism which developed in the First International. Yes, there are differences (and some unfortunate Proudhon bashing due to the need to refute those around Tolain) but in terms of their analysis of capitalism (exploitation rooted in production due to wage-labour), the state as an unreformable hierarchical institution of class rule and their vision of a socio-economic federation based on workers’ self-management of production and communal self-government the links are obvious.
Suffice to say, if someone asks why Proudhon is important the obvious answer is to ask why the Paris Commune is important. You cannot dismiss Proudhon and praise the Commune — the later reflected the ideas of the former. Similarly, there is good reason why the likes of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Rocker and Guerin all praised Proudhon and considered him the founder of anarchism. Yes, he is not perfect but he contributed immensely to the commonwealth of ideas which is anarchism. You can get a taste of this from the three reviews I did of his works for Freedom: What is Property?, System of Economic Contradictions and General Idea of the Revolution. Property is Theft! will show that is the case and why, for all his flaws, he is worth reading today.
Capital F Friends, you’ll be seeing it in the mail soon. If you’re the other kind of friend, pick up a copy here. You won’t be disappointed. Property is Theft challenges us all to look further back, dig in, and re-discover the roots of our radical tradition.
