Hi there, folks—in the interest of getting the info out as far and wide as possible, we’re reposting most of a message that just went out over our customer email list. So, we apologize if this is the second time you’ve seen it…but it’s still exciting, right?
If you’re NOT on our email list, please take a moment to sign up. It won’t be a bother, we promise—you don’t want to miss good stuff like this, and we don’t usually repost the messages here!
Without further ado…
Web Sale: 25% Off Everything!
For those of you in the Bay Area, we hope you’ll stop by our annual warehouse sale, where you’ll get 25% off anything in the warehouse and hundreds of sale titles for $1-$5! You can find the details here.
For the rest of you, don’t despair—we’re offering an online sale as well! Now through Wednesday, December 8, you’ll get 25% off any and all orders from the AK Press website! Books, DVDs, CDs, t-shirts, calendars…so many excellent giftable items (or gifts to yourself)!
Please note: discounts will be applied to all items after we receive your order but before we charge your card (unfortunately our website can’t apply discounts automatically). Does not apply to gift certificates or Friends of AK Press memberships.
New from AK Press Publishing:
Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures, 1960s to Now
Dara Greenwald & Josh MacPhee (eds)
In association with Exit Art
AK Press
$28.95 “If you care about social change, this may well be the most important ‘art history’ book that you will ever read.” -The Yes Men
Drawn from an exhibition at Exit Art, Signs of Change is a visual archive of more than 350 posters, prints, photographs, films, videos, music, and ephemera from more than twenty-five nations. This groundbreaking work illustrates the extraordinary aesthetic range of radical movements during the past fifty years and explores the rise of powerful countercultures that evolve beyond traditional politics, creating distinct forms of art, lifestyles, and social organizations.
Work: 2011 Calendar
Justseeds Artists’ Collective
AK Press
$16.00
From the Justseeds Artists’ Collective and AK Press comes a fun intervention into the discursive world around work. Our 2011 calendar explores the theme of what work is, and should be, through the lens of thirteen different artists, all with very different visual styles and approaches. From the pleasure of work itself, to the hard times, the fight for our rights, and the global financial system and its creep into our world of work, each page in this oversized calendar features the work of a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Collective, printed in four colors by the collectively-run Eberhardt Press in Portland.
The 10th annual (and still awesome!) calendar from the Certain Days collective. This year the calendar goes back to basics with the theme “Political Prisoners: Still in the Struggle.” The calendar features writings by, and information about, political prisoners-plus art by Leonard Peltier, Malaquias Montoya, Melanie Cervantes, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, Favianna Rodriguez, Josh MacPhee, and more!
Solidarity Forever: Labor History Calendar 2011 IWW
$12.00
The 2011 version of the Philadelphia IWW’s annual labor history calendar! Wow! It would make a great gift for those special workers or labor buffs in your life, wouldn’t it?
Not Your Fodder: Organizing Against the Militarization of Youth, 2011 Calendar
War Resisters League $14.95
A directory of counter-military-recruitment projects around the country, this year’s Peace Calendar serves as documentation of this vibrant grassroots movement, as well as an organizing resource. Find out how activists around the country are resisting the militarization of our youth! This is a spiral-bound desk planner laid out week by week with full-color artwork throughout.
2011 Slingshot Organizers Slingshot Collective
Pocket Organizer – $6.00
Desk Planner – $12.00
Handy calendars (available in two sizes!) with space to write your engagements, addresses, and notes. Each week is sprinkled with historical dates, reasons to riot, radical resources, and inspirational events, all laid out in that funky Slingshot style.
…and more calendars
We wont’ list all our excellent offerings here, so check out our website for the rest (and check back soon if you don’t see the perfect one yet, there are still more coming in!)…
New Titles from AK Press Distro:
Zinester’s Guide to NYC Ayun Halliday (ed)
Microcosm
$9.99
A top-to-bottom, on-the-cheap, warts-and-all exploration of the city that never sleeps. Whether you’re looking for a scam-able coffee or a place to grab a Japanese breakfast, art supplies, volunteer opportunities, or a four-story Korean bathhouse, the ZG2NYC has it all. Just like the popular Zinester’s Guide to Portland, the pocket-sized NYC book is divided into illustrated, user-friendly sections (bars! pizza! historic buildings! veggie options! open mics! craft supplies! the keys to low-budget NYC romance!) that give up the goods for first-timers and native New Yorkers alike.
Also new (and awesome) from our friends at Microcosm: The Book Bindery!
Celebrate People’s History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution
Josh MacPhee (ed)
Feminist Press
$24.95
Since 1998, Josh MacPhee has commissioned and produced over one hundred posters that pay tribute to revolution, racial justice, women’s rights, queer liberation, labor struggles, and creative activism and organizing. Celebrate People’s History presents these essential moments-acts of resistance and great events in an often hidden history of human and civil rights struggles-as a visual tour through decades and across continents, from the perspective of some of the most interesting and socially engaged artists working today.
Don’t Mourn, Balkanize!: Essays After Yugoslavia
Andrej Grubacic
PM Press
$20.00 Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! is the first book written from the radical left perspective on the topic of Yugoslav space after the dismantling of the country. In this collection of essays, commentaries, and interviews, Andrej Grubacic speaks about the politics of balkanization—about the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, neoliberal structural adjustment, humanitarian intervention, supervised independence of Kosovo, occupation of Bosnia, and other episodes of Power which he situates in the long historical context of colonialism, conquest and intervention. But he also tells the story of the Balkans seen from below: a space of pirates and rebels; a refuge of feminists and socialists, anti-fascists and partisans; a home of new social movements of occupied and recovered factories; a place of dreamers of all sorts struggling both against provincial “peninsularity” as well as against occupations, foreign interventions and that process which is now often described by that fashionable term, “balkanization.”
Multinational corporations, the IMF and World Bank, national governments, and humanitarian organizations regularly promote development as the only road to security—but those being “developed” know otherwise. Staying Alive makes clear why this development paradigm—implemented through enclosure, privatization, corporate piracy, marginalization, and violence—is more accurately characterized as maldevelopment, and how it is inexorably dragging the world down a path of self-destruction. This pioneering work illuminates how women, more than surviving the crises brought on by development, are creating and safeguarding vital sources of knowledge and vision on not only how to stay alive, but why we should in the first place.
Perspectives on Anarchist Theory: The Politics of Climate Change (Vol.12 #2)
Institute for Anarchist Studies
$6.00
The house journal of the Institute for Anarchist Studies is back and better than ever-in a beautiful new perfect-bound paperback format. This new issue takes on the issue of climate change with articles like “Movements for Climate Action” (Brian Tokar); “Atmospheric Dialectics” (Javier Sethness); and more, plus “What We’re Reading” by John Duda, Cindy Crabb, and Joshua Stevens!
…and more new titles
Check out the other latest additions to the AK Distro catalog. We add new titles each week and there’s sure to be something for everyone on your gift list..
Not sure what to get for that special someone?
AK Press Gift Certificates
Available in all denominations
Let your friends and loved ones choose for themselves! If you don’t see the right amount listed on our website, just give us a call or send us an e-mail and we’ll be happy to help you out.
Friends of AK Press Subscription
With so many great titles being printed, there’s no time like the present to join the Friends of AK Press program! (Seriously… it’s a great deal. You won’t be sorry.) And hey, a Friends of AK Press subscription makes a great gift (as does the Friends of AK tote bag that comes with it)!
Here’s a few recent foreign editions of AK Press books that have been published. It’s always a thrill to see our titles from another publisher. Book design and presentation vary greatly around the world but these three editions look top notch. If any readers of the blog are fluent in German, French, or Turkish then you are in luck!
A recent reflection on the 11th anniversary of the Seattle WTO protests by AK Press author and longtime Bay Area organizer David Solnit. Be sure to check out the book that David co-edited with his sister, the ever-prescient Rebecca Solnit, on Seattle ’99: The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle.
Eleven Years After the WTO Uprising: Seattle, Detroit, Cancun and the Immokalee Workers
By David Solnit (Reprinted from the Indypendent)
Eleven years ago, beginning on November 30, 1999, a public uprising shut down the World Trade Organization and occupied downtown Seattle.
That same week in 1999, three thousand miles away in Immokalee, Florida, farmworkers carried out a five day general strike against abusive growers paying starvation wages. Two weeks ago, on November 16, 2010 those same growers – the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange representing 90 percent of the industry – publicly agreed to every one of the farmworkers “Fair Food” demands.
Now seems like an important time to remind ourselves that when we organize, have some strategy and rebel we can build power and win change. The Seattle uprising was just a warm up for what is needed and to come as we face the crisis of wars, corporate capitalism and climate change. We continue to win victories and build movements; from recent historic farm worker victory in Florida, to the successful US Social Forum in Detroit in the Spring to the climate justice mobilization today in Cancun, Mexico.
SEATTLE
On November 30th tens of thousands of people joined the nonviolent direct action blockade that encircled the WTO Ministerial conference site, keeping the most powerful institution on earth shut down from dawn until dusk. People did not back down in the face teargas, rubber bullets and even the National Guard being deployed.
Long shore workers shut down every West Coast port from Alaska to Los Angeles. Large numbers of Seattle taxi drivers went on strike. All week unionized firefighters refused to turn their fire hoses on people. Tens of thousands skipped or walked out of work or school. Coordinated actions took place across the planet.
Thousands continued nonviolent direct action, marches, and protest throughout the week, despite a clampdown that included nearly 600 arrests, the declaration of a “state of emergency,” and suspension of the basic rights of free speech and assembly in downtown Seattle. Hundreds of independent media journalists founded Indymedia and did an end run around corporate media getting the real story out. A month later, after corporate media attempts to marginalize the uprising, a January 2000 opinion poll by Business Week found that 52 percent of Americans supported with the activists at the WTO in Seattle.
Mass action in Seattle and afterwards was a convergence of movements, networks and communities taking on the system, not a single movement focused on the issue of trade. Those movements, networks and people continue in Immokalee, Detroit, Cancun and everywhere.
Friday, December 3 from 4-10PM
AK PRESS HOLIDAY SALE!
AK Press Warehouse / 674-A 23rd Street, Oakland
Come out and browse our stacks, see what’s new, stock up on holiday gifts (if you’re into that sort of thing), take advantage of a 25% discount on EVERYTHING IN THE WAREHOUSE, and check out our tables full of sale books priced from $1-$5. Not to mention, of course, the delicious refreshments and good company you have come to expect. Bring your friends and neighbors!
Just got this from the support network for AK friend and author Dara Greenwald, who has been battling cancer since the summer:
If you’re looking for holiday gifts and/or you’ve been wanting to help out artist/activist Dara Greenwald (and her partner Josh MacPhee) in their financial/emotional/medical battle against cancer and expensive chemotherapy bills, now is your chance!
Dara’s friends have created an incredible online art auction – where for 7 days – starting today, you can buy affordable works of art, literature, music, photography and film by fantastically talented and renowned artists, scholars and activists. All proceeds go straight to Dara!
And please, please pass on the word to your lovers and to art-lovers: The auction only runs till December 5th!
Also, don’t forget that AK Press is donating all proceeds from the sale of Dara & Josh’s latest book, the incomparable Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now, on our website or at an AK Press table through the end of the month, directly to Dara’s health fund. Makes a great gift, for yourself, for your mom, or for just about anyone you know who’s interested in art or social movements.
Nice mini-review of Chris Ealham’s tremendous book, Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937 from our friends at the Kate Sharpley Library. Check it out!
Anarchism and the City
Class War in Barcelona: “Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937” by Chris Ealham [Review]
M. Bookunin
Anarchism is more than just the idea of stateless socialism, and the movement is always shaped by the environment where it grows. In Anarchism and the City, Ealham’s focus is not personalities or philosophies, but anarchist activity and how it connected to working class life. He covers the context it evolved and operated in, including the ideas and actions of ruling class.
This is an academic book, so you get the language of the specialist: “Consistent with the culture of working class resistance to the spatial logic of bourgeois control in the city and betraying signs of earlier protest repertoires, those deemed responsible for the military coup were punished through the destruction of their property.” (p185) Thankfully, it’s not incomprehensible, and even gets poetic at times: “L’Opinió [left-wing Republican paper] printed a section entitled ‘The Robbery of the Day’ in which minor non-violent thefts were described sensationally as if the streets were teeming with blood-crazed felons.” (p151)
You get some great stories about what the anarchists (and workers) did, from the CNT Public Services Union tunnelling into the Model Jail in the December 1933 insurrection (p136) to the revolutionary recycling of 1936: “In one barri the local church was converted into a cinema. Elsewhere, confession boxes were used as newspaper kiosks, market stalls and bus shelters…” (p187)
Ealham doesn’t just say what happened, but why. He records the actions and ideas of the powerful, but he’s especially strong on the connection between the anarchists and the working class communities they lived in. This is the key to the book. The strength of the CNT was not in the numbers at conferences, but the numbers it could call on on the streets:
“One of the great paradoxes of the CNT was that, despite its huge membership in the city, the number of union activists was relatively small. … Besides their higher degree of class consciousness – activists were commonly known as ‘the ones with ideas’ (los con ideas) – there was nothing in their dress, lifestyle, behaviour, experiences, speech or place of residence to set them apart from the rest of the workers and, whether at a public meeting, a paper sale, in the factory or the cafe, activists could convey and disseminate ideas in a way that workers found both convincing and understandable.” (p41-2) And the tactics they used were connected to working-class life too: “CNT tactics like boycotts, demonstrations and strikes built on neighbourhood sociability: union assemblies mirrored working-class street culture, and the reciprocal solidarity of the barris was concretised and given organisational expression by the support afforded to confederated unions.” (p36)
This is an epic contribution to the history of anarchism and like the best history books leaves you wanting more (even if you don’t agree with all of Ealham’s perspectives). Today’s anarchist activists (from syndicalists to insurrectionaries) will find some fascinating stories here. But more importantly, they will find food for thought about where were are, where we want to be, and how we get there. If you have a new world in your heart, read this and start asking who’s going to help you build it.
I recently had the pleasure of tabling at the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair. (I love to table. I am a tabling robot. I am speaking in a robot voice.) I flew out of Baltimore on Friday 10/8 to head to Edmonton. My flight got in at 11:30 or something ridiculous like that, and bookfair organizers Sean and Jeff were kind enough to pick me up from the airport and take me to a DANCE PARTY! I was so gruesomely tired and luckily the dancing part was winding down so I didn’t have to limp around the dance floor like the old jet-lagged hag that I was. This turned out to be great as it gave me a chance to mill about and talk to some new folks. Yay talking to new folks at anarchist bookfairs! After the party I was ushered to my accommodations (or “billets” in Canadian), which were at the house of a friend of theirs who happened to be out of town all weekend. I had a shower in my room, which was very luxurious, and good wireless so I could obsessively check my email throughout the night. A far cry from the sleeping bag on the floor that I’m used to when tabling.
Saturday morning I woke up refreshed at a mad decent hour, caffeinated myself, walked around the neighborhood a bit, and strolled the leisurely 5 blocks to the site of the bookfair. Finding a farmers market on the way was a bonus, so I picked up some fruit and carrots to munch on throughout the day (not realizing that the bookfair organizers had an entire kitchen crew working all weekend to feed the speakers, tablers, and bookfair-goers. They made freaking sushi and samosas and stew and they were awesome). The bookfair took place at the Cosmopolitan Music Center and attached community center. I rearranged the table, put out new stock and settled in with the Edmonton Wobs on one side, and Black Books Distro from Edmonton on the other. Some of the other vendors were Black Cat Press, PM Press, Black Sheep Collective in Calgary, Migratory Words Literary Collective, Vegan Outreach in Edmonton, Make Total Distro, ThoughtcrimeInk, and more!
Saturday night there was another dance party. The theme for the night: Pajamarchy! I’m not gonna lie; there was a whole lot of no-pants going on. This was followed by an after-party, which was followed by an after-after-party (which may or may not have taken place in a drained swimming pool, and which I very wisely decided to forego, though I hear it was fun!). Gotta give a shout out to organizers who make sure that dance parties get built in to anarchist bookfairs.
On Sunday I was hungover and wore my sunglasses inside! A new friend brought me a gatorade! I did a lot of trade sales! It was great!
Workshops throughout the weekend included “What is Capitalism? What is Revolution?”, “Beyond Resistance: Logistics of Struggle”, “The Web of Struggles: Organizing Across Multiple Sites of Oppression” hosted by No One is Illegal, and “Community Organizing 101: How to talk to (and work with) Non-Anarchists.” I didn’t see any of them, because I was at the table selling a crap-ton of books. Folks were pretty excited to get the new AK titles without the insane cost of international shipping. AK Thompson’s Black Bloc, White Riot was a huge hit, along with Cindy Milstein’s Anarchism and Its Aspirations.
There were a lot of really cool folks there and it was my pleasure to make their acquaintance. Also, I didn’t realize how far north Edmonton is. I looked at in on a map after I got there and had a panic attack that I was at the top of the freaking world and might fly off into the outer atmosphere! But I didn’t. I got back to Baltimore Monday night, lighter by one mostly-empty tube of toothpaste confiscated by customs officers. And I didn’t even get run out of the country for telling the best Canadian anarchist joke ever! Okay, okay, I’ll tell it…
We just received the call for participation for Left Forum 2011! Check it out … and, hey all you AK authors: you should really think about proposing a panel for this year’s conference! It’s a great event, and we’ll be there tabling, as always! It would be nice to see a larger anarchist presence this year …
Left Forum
Text reads:
Left Forum Conference: Pace University, March 18-20 2011
Towards a Politics of Solidarity
This year’s Left Forum will focus on the age-old theme of solidarity: the moral act of imagination underpinning working class victories everywhere. It will undertake to examine the new forms of far-reaching solidarity that are both necessary and possible in an increasingly global world.
The spread and intensification of capitalism across the globe binds people together in complex interdependencies – as producers, consumers, victims, and insurgents. And as this process continues, the connections between people become more evident. The rebel Zapatistas in the Lacandon jungle understood clearly that the North American Free Trade Agreement forged in Washington was a direct threat to their traditional way of life and their aspirations for the future.
The potential for transformative struggles in the 21st century depends on new chains of solidarity—between workers in the rich world and workers in the global south, indigenous peasants and more affluent consumers, students and pensioners, villagers in the Niger Delta and environmental campaigners in the Gulf of Mexico, marchers and rioters in Greece and Spain, and unionists in the United States and China.
This year’s Left Forum will contribute to the intellectual underpinnings of new and tighter forms of world-wide solidarity upon which all successful emancipatory struggles of the future will depend.
Please join us once again in building upon the successes of last year’s conference – 200+ panels, 600+ speakers, 3000+ attendees, art shows and theater performances, and plenaries that included Arundhati Roy, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Noam Chomsky.
The conference will be held from March 18-20, 2011, at Pace University in NYC. Early registration discounts are available for a limited time – register now!
Hi friends! Today is technically my day “off” so I’m going to take a bit of a cop-out on blogging today and leave you with a bit of text, and some lovely images from the inside of AK’s brand-new wall-calendar WORK, a collaboration with the wonderful folks over at the Justseeds Artists Collective. Friend of mine described it last night as an “art of the month” calendar, meaning that there’s not much space to write notes to yourself, but the twelve four-color, offset printed, oversize images we’ve chosen to include are sure to brighten your darkest days and provide some food for thought. Be sure to order a copy today, and, while you’re at it, why not buy a few to give as gifts this year to all the hard-workers you know? You won’t be sorry!
What is work? In a broad sense, “work” is the activities that produce a result; for our concerns, let’s call that “social wealth.” Yet it’s a question that begs so many more—perhaps none more pressing than “What should work be?” We all have ideas of what work shouldn’t be: mind-numbing, exploitative, hierarchical, dangerous, disempowering, etc. Though things get muddled when we try and flip the question around.
When we say that work should be creative, just, cooperative, healthy, and empowering we are laying an ethical, more than practical, groundwork. Ethics alone won’t help us solve questions such as “What share of the social wealth and I due for the time I spend at work?”; “Does my time parenting contribute to the social wealth to the same degree as my work as an electrician?”; “How do we place value on different kinds of work that each contribute to the social wealth?”; “If I choose not to contribute to the creation of social wealth, am I guaranteed any part of it?” These aren’t trivial questions—nor are they entirely new. But before we get too philosophical about it, let’s remember that at the end of the day, the water still has to flow from the tap, we need eyeglasses, and food and shelter are a must. So yes, the struggle to re-envision work is ethical, philosophical, theoretical, and practical.
And if work provides social wealth for all, perhaps we should make a distinction between working to produce for the good of all and working for a paycheck. Is it possible that our economy morph into one based on reciprocity instead of profit motive? Can we erode class society by building institutions and practice that militate against it? Can we create a sense of pride and dignity in our work practices, with a domino effect of solidarity to follow?
So we have before us a calendar produced by the hard-working aesthetes at Justseeds. For every month there’s a new image relating to our topic of work: be it the pleasure of work itself, the hard times, the fight for our rights, the global financial system and its creep into our world of work, or the fight for control over our lives.
Let’s spend this year thinking about the world of work, our own and that going on all around us.And let’s peer into how it numbs minds, exploits, kills, and disempowers and how it could be creative, just, cooperative, healthy, and empowering. Maybe after next year we’ll be that much more prepared to answer the perennial question, “What should work be?”
(Click on any of the images below to see a larger version!)
It’s here! We thought this day would never come, but Signs of Change, the stunning visual archive of over five decades of social movement art edited by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee (in association with NYC’s Exit Art gallery) has arrived, and it looks phenomenal. Worth the wait, if we do say so ourselves.
As some of you may know, during the final stages of completing Signs of Change, editor and friend Dara Greenwald was diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer. After multiple surgeries and treatments, Dara is on the road to recovery, but she’s still not out of danger, and she’s unable to work to support herself. With Josh serving has her primary caregiver, his availability to work is also severely limited. We need your help to support our friends during this difficult time! AK Press will donate the profits from all sales of the book on our website or at AK Press tables in the month of November, directly to Dara’s health fund. Don’t delay—order your copy today! (And, be sure to check out http://www.healdarag.org, to find out about other ways you can help support Dara and Josh.)
Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures, 1960s to Now
Work: 2011 Calendar
Certain Days: 2011 Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar
Solidarity Forever: Labor History Calendar 2011
Not Your Fodder: Organizing Against the Militarization of Youth, 2011 Calendar
2011 Slingshot Organizers
Zinester’s Guide to NYC
Celebrate People’s History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution
Don’t Mourn, Balkanize!: Essays After Yugoslavia
Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development
Perspectives on Anarchist Theory: The Politics of Climate Change (Vol.12 #2)
AK Press Gift Certificates
Friends of AK Press Subscription
s ago, beginning on November 30, 1999, a public uprising shut down the World Trade Organization and occupied downtown Seattle.
