L.A. Anarchist Bookfair: Actions + Conversations + Intersections 2010

By now most folks have heard the story about Tilikum, an orca currently held in captivity at Florida’s Sea World, who seized his trainer, Dawn Brancheau, and drowned her at the end of a performance early last week. Sea World has largely described the incident as a tragic accident, defending the practice of keeping wild animals in captivity for the purposes of education and entertainment, and claiming that accidents happen … and that trainers know the risks they take working with orcas, which are perhaps better known under the more common name of “killer whales.” Yet many animal rights activists have a different perspective on Tilikum’s actions: though the death of Dawn Brancheau is a tragic event, to be sure, some authors and activists, like Jason Hribal, author of the forthcoming Counterpunch book Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance, suggest that Tilikum’s actions are a sign of resistance to captivity that Sea World, and other such sites, attempt to cover up by dismissing such incidents as “accidents.” Hribal actually profiles Tilikum, and his fellow captive whales, in the new book, due out this Fall. We’re pleased to reproduce an excerpt below, which originally ran on Counterpunch on February 25.

*****

The Struggle of Nootka and Tilikum

It was the first time that a trainer had ever been killed by a group of captive killer whales. There had been previous attempts, a great many actually. But the trainers involved, whether through rescue by other employees or a stroke of luck on their part, had always managed to survive. This attack, however, proved to be different and fatal. It occurred on February 21, 1991 at Sealand of the Pacific.

That day’s final performance had just ended at the Victoria, British Columbia based aquarium and the audience was pleased. They got to watch three killer whales, Nootka, Haida, and Tilikum, perform tricks, including one trick wherein a young female trainer rode on the back of one of these great sea mammals. It seemed to be wonderful fun—that is, until that particular female trainer fell into the water. As she attempted to climb out, an orca latched on to her. “The whale got her foot,” an audience member recalled to reporters, “and pulled her in.” We do not know which orca it was that started it, but all three, Nootka, Haida, and Tilikum, took their turns dunking the screaming woman underwater. “She went up and down three times,” another visitor continued. The Sealand employees “almost got her once with the hook pole, but they couldn’t because the whales were moving so fast.” One trainer tossed out a floatation ring, but the whales would not let her grab it. In fact, the closer that such devices got to the young woman, the further out the whales pulled her into the pool. It took park officials two hours to recover her drowned body.

Responding to the death, Sealand dismissed any claims that the whales had hurt the woman on purpose. “It was just a tragic accident,” the park manager lamented. “I just can’t explain it.” A few of the trainers speculated that Nootka, Haida, and Tilikum might have been playing “a game” that simply went wrong, and their coworker was mistakenly killed in the process. There was, however, precedent for a different interpretation.

In 1989, there had been two violent incidences involving Nootka. The first occurred in April. A trainer was in the middle of a routine activity, scratching the orca’s tongue, when that orca decided to turn the tables. Nootka “bit her hand and dragged her into the whale pool.” The woman had to be rescued by a fellow employee. Sealand, for its part, chose not to notify the authorities or the press. It believed that, although the trainer received lacerations and needed stitches, Nootka did not really intend to bite the person, and the situation remained in control. The trainer thought differently. Citing “unsafe conditions,” she quit her job.

Nootka struck again later that year. A tourist was taking pictures, when he accidentally dropped his camera in the water. The orca quickly noticed the object and put it into her mouth. When a trainer tried to retrieve the camera, Nootka used the opportunity to grab a hold of the man’s leg and jerk him into the pool. The trainer had to be rescued. Sealand administrators chose, once again, to deny that there was intentionality behind Nootka’s actions. No one needed to know about this incidence. Nevertheless, more trainers did resign their positions. Nootka, they believed, was purposeful and dangerous in her actions.

Elsewhere in Canada, other theme parks were having their own troubles. About a decade earlier, the Vancouver Aquarium had its hands full with Skana and Hyak. Both orcas were described by their trainer as “moody.” Working with the former was particularly precarious, as the female whale could switch from an obedient disposition to a rebellious one “in minutes.” “Skana once showed her dislike,” a Vancouver employee explained, “by dragging a trainer around the pool.” “Her teeth sank into his wetsuit but missed the leg.”

For Marineland, near picturesque Niagara Falls, it was the same but only with a different pair of whales. There was Kandu. She once yanked a trainer around the pool by the leg after the man fell off his back during a stunt. The employee was sent immediately to the hospital and a pale audience stumbled out of the stadium in disbelief. Than there was Nootka, a similarly named but all together unrelated orca to the one at Sealand. During a mid-1980s performance, she struck a trainer in the head with her pectoral fin. Aquarium administrators pronounced that it was an accident. Her trainers knew better. As one of them disclosed, Nootka often leapt out of the water in order to punch her trainers directly in the chest. She wanted to hurt people.

Interestingly, to date, there have been a total of five orcas named Nootka. Sea World had one. Marineland had another. And Sealand actually had the other three. Its first was captured in 1973 off the western Canadian coast. She died after nine months. Sealand tried again in 1975 with another female brought from the same waters. She did not fair any better and died within the year. Less than a decade later, Sealand decided to make one more attempt and flew in a young Icelandic female. She, miraculously, survived. Indeed, the average life expectancy during this era for captive orcas stood between one to four years. Aquariums often went through a whole series of whales before just one of them made it into adolescence. Today, that life expectancy has improved: rising to about ten years. Yet it is still a far cry from the thirty to sixty years that orcas can live in the ocean.

Sea World, for instance, has had fifty-one Shamus. The original was captured in 1965, after animal collector Ted Griffin harpooned the calf’s mother in Puget Sound. Betting with the odds, Sea World would only lease the animal at first. Who knows how long she would last? But, when the young orca made it through the year, the park bought her outright for $100,000. Sea World made Shamu the central figure in its operations. All marketing from this point forward was geared towards her. There would be Shamu commercials. There would be Shamu shows. There would be Shamu dolls and t-shirts. Shamu became, in the words of one director, the park’s “Mickey Mouse.” This orca did, however, have the power to disrupt these well-laid plans.

In 1971, during a publicity stunt, Shamu was being filmed with bikini-clad women riding on her back. Suddenly, she tossed the woman off and began dunking the person underwater. There were two divers in the small pool, but Shamu shrugged them off like little insects. The chaotic scene continued for a few minutes: a hysterical woman, divers tumbling in the wake, and trainers at the poolside desperately holding out poles. The individual would, eventually, be rescued. But the deed was done and the images made the local news. Shamu, apparent to all, was not near as friendly or cooperative as the amusement park would have liked us to believe. Sea World had its first major incident. At the end of the day, though, the orca’s actions were not enough to bring down the park. Operations would continue and, fifty-one Shamus later, Sea World has thrived. It has become a flagship vacation destination with three current locations: San Diego, Orlando, and San Antonio. They have hotels, restaurants, roller coasters, merchandise, and special events. They have adventure camps for grade school and high school students. They have a multitude of animal exhibitions and performances. They have extensive breeding and research programs. Shamu has made Sea World’s owners very rich.

Back at Sealand, the situation was not as rosy. The attack by Nootka, Haida, and Tilikum left the park in a public relations freefall. Administrators promised changes. New safety procedures would be initiated. Physical contact between the trainers and whales will no longer be allowed. Guardrails will be installed along the poolside to prevent slips or bites. But the public pressure would not let up. Between the daily protests at the park’s front gates, national demands that the orcas be released back to the ocean, and the city council’s entrance into the debate, Sealand’s will crumbled. In August of 1991, the park reached a startling decision. “After a lot of thought and discussion,” the director clarified, “it was decided killer whales should be phased out.” Less than one year later, Sealand shut down its entire operations. The twenty-nine year old institution had closed permanently.

The three whales, including Haida’s newborn calf, were sold to Sea World for five million dollars. The decision was made in secret, and the export permits were granted behind closed doors. The public at-large was not allowed into the conversation. Tilikum was shipped out under the cover of the night to Orlando, where he still resides. Nootka would soon follow him. She died in 1994 at the age of thirteen. Haida and her calf, Ky, went to San Antonio. Three years after the death of his mother in 2001, Ky made news of his own. That July, during a performance in front a thousand people, the orca jumped on top of his trainer and repeatedly pushed the man underwater. Sea World, afterwards, tried to pass the incident off as rough play, saying that at no time was the trainer in danger. Witnesses did not buy it. As one of them explained, “the whale was staying between the [exit] ramp and the trainer and finally the trainer jumped on top of the whale’s back and leaped over him and another trainer caught him.” At that point, “the whale turned around and slammed down on the ramp and he was pretty upset that the trainer got out of the pool.” Yesterday, the trainer did not escape.

Jason Hribal is the co-author of The Cry of Nature: an Appeal for Mercy on Behalf of Persecuted Animals. His new book, Fear of the Animal Planet, will be published this fall by AK Press / CounterPunch Books.

Our pals at the Kate Sharpley Library have been busy, First, they’ve just published the February/March edition of their Bulletin:

KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library No. 61, February/March 2010

• Anna Mendleson 1948-2009.
• Bookunin, M. Black flame : the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt [Review].
• Guillamón, Agustín. Abel Paz, Anarchist and Historian.
• Sharkey, Paul. Vladimiro Muñoz 1920-2004.
• Szarapow, - Life of the Anarchist ‘Jesuit’ (Apollon Karelin) [Review].
• View PDF (212.3 KB)

They’ve also got a new pamphlet out:

New pamphlet on the resistance to Francoism by Antonio Téllez

The Kate Sharpley Library are pleased to announce our latest publication:
“Anarchist International Action Against Francoism From Genoa 1949 to The First Of May Group” by Antonio Téllez Solà, translated by Paul Sharkey

From the end of the Spanish Civil War, the anarchist movement fought to undermine the Francoist dictatorship. Solidarity actions in Western Europe aimed to isolate the regime, and bring pressure to bear in defence of militants inside Spain. Determined to avoid casualties, their campaign of armed protests saved many activists from the death penalty.

Contents:

• The attack on Spain’s embassy in Genoa in 1949
• The Libertarian movement in the fight against Franco (1962-1974): The Internal Defence agency (DI) and the Iberian Libertarian Youth Federation’s (FIJL) First of May Group
• The 1962 abduction of Spain’s honorary vice-consul in Milan
• One Episode in the Libertarian Movement’s Struggle against Francoism : The “First of May Group” and the kidnapping in Rome of Monsignor Marcos Ussia, the ecclesiatical attaché at Spain’s embassy to the Vatican (Friday 29 April 1966-Wednesday 11 May 1966)
• Antonio Téllez Solà, the Herodotus of the anti-Franco maquis by Stuart Christie

ISBN 9781873605851 Anarchist Sources series 13. 25 pages $3/£3 (£2 to subscribers)

And they made a ton of new documents available online in February:

• Ciriaco Duarte and Anarchism in Paraguay

• Rafael Barrett, a brilliant anarchist misrepresented [Review]

• Italian Anarchist Activity in Brazil: 1909

• The Soldier

• Anybody who comes across CIRA has stumbled upon a treasure

• A Letter from the Netherlands

• Letter from Le Pommier

• A Library is Born

• José Maria Villegas (1917-2008)

• Mayday and Anarchism. Remembrance and Resistance from Haymarket to now [Review]

• Two new pamphlets from the Kate Sharpley Library [Review]

• Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity by Dan Berger [Review]

• What is Anarchism? by Alexander Berkman [Review]

• Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magon Reader [Review]

• Free Women of Spain : Anarchism and the struggle for the emancipation of women by Martha Ackelsberg [Review]

• For Workers’ Power: the selected writings of Maurice Brinton [A Review]

• Chomsky on Anarchism by Noam Chomsky [Review]

• Anarchist Voices. An Oral History of Anarchism in America by Paul Avrich [Review]

• Between Canada and the USA : a tale of immigrants and anarchists

• River Plate anarchist militants in the Spanish libertarian movement

• José Grunfeld (1907-2005)

• Report on Anarchism in China in 1925

• The Praia Street Raiders : Porto Alegre (Brazil) 1911

• Vladimiro Muñoz 1920-2004

To stay up to date, check out their feed here.

And for a complete list of KSL publications available from AK Press, go here.

It’s almost here, so a quick overview…

—-

March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education

On October 24, 2009 more than 800 students, workers, and teachers converged at UC Berkeley at the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. This massive meeting brought together representatives from over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education – Pre K-12, Adult Education, CC, CSU and UC – to “decide on a statewide action plan capable of winning this struggle, which will define the future of public education in this state, particularly for the working class and communities of color.”

After hours of open collective discussion, the conference democratically voted, as its principal decision, to call for a statewide Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010. The conference decided that all schools, unions and organizations are free to choose their specific demands and tactics – such as strikes, walkouts, march to Sacramento, rallies, occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, etc. – for March 4, as well as the duration of such actions.

We refuse to let those in power continue to pit us against each other. If we unite, we have the power to shut down business-as-usual and to force those in power to grant our demands. Building a powerful movement to defend public education will, in turn, advance the struggle in defense of all public-sector workers and services.

We call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations across the state to endorse this call and massively mobilize and organize for the Strike and Day of Action on March 4.

Let’s make this an historic turning point in the struggle against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and educational segregation in California.

To endorse this call and to receive more information, please contact march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com and consult
www.defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com

_____________________________________
Endorsers:
Oct. 24th Mobilizing Conference to Defend Public Education
Statewide Coalition of University Employees
Statewide UPTE
Solidarity Alliance at UCB
General Assembly at UCB
CFT: CA Federation of Teachers
United Teachers Los Angeles: the largest teachers local in CA
AFSCME Local 444: East Bay Municipal Utility District
AFT 1021: part of United Teachers LA, represents over 10,000
California Labor Federation, which has over 2 million workers in unions
California Faculty Association [CFA]: CSU Faculty Union,representing the 23,000 professors, librarians, etc.
Student Senate for California Community Colleges (SSCCC) - the SSCCC endorses a march 4th day of action
Carpenters Local 713 passed AFSCME Local 444’s
CDPH Inter Union Organizing Committee: SEIU 1000, Stationary Engineers 39, CAPS, PEGS, and others have joined the March 4th Strike Call
Oakland Education Association- 2,800 teachers,counselors and librarians
Association of Raza Educators
San Francisco Labor Council
California State University Employees Union
California Teachers Association
Coalition for Equal Quality Education, Boston, MA
United Educators of San Francisco
Third World Assembly at UCB
SWAT at UCB
7th Generation Nation at UC Davis
California College Democrats
_____________________________________

MARCH 4 Strike and Day of Action REGIONAL EVENTS (http://thirdworldjournal.co.cc/?p=140)
List will be updated frequently as more events and details are finalized.

Regional Events

Los Angeles Regional Rally

• 3 pm Rally @ Pershing Square (5th & Hill) in downtown L.A.
• 4 pm March from Pershing Square to the Governor’s office
• 5 pm Rally @ Governor’s office (300 Spring St.)

East Bay/Oakland Regional Rally

• 12 pm-4 pm Rally @ Frank Ogawa Plaza (in front of Oakland City Hall, 14th & Broadway)
• March to the Ogawa Plaza Rally from:

-UC Berkeley: 12 pm Rally @ Bancroft & Telegraph, followed by March

-Laney College: 11 am Rally, followed by March

-Fruitvale BART: Assemble @ 11 am, March @ 11:30 am
• Travel to San Francisco Regional Rally (See regional listing below)

San Francisco Regional Rally

• Rally at Civic Center @ 1:30 – SF State Students will be marching to meet here
• Rally @ 3 pm 24th and Mission – K-12 march to Civic center with CCSF, SF State
• 5 pm Rally @ San Francisco Civic Center
• *Other K-12 schools planning morning events and march to Civic Center 1:00-3:00

Sacramento/State Capitol Rally

• 11 am-1 pm Rally @ State Capitol (North Steps of Capitol)

San Diego Regional Rally

• 3 pm Rally @ Balboa Park, followed by March to governor’s office
• 4 pm Rally @ Governor’s office (downtown)

San Fernando Valley Regional Rally

• 3:45 pm gathering @ CSU Northridge Sierra Quad
• 4:15 pm March
• 5 pm Hands around CSUN
• 5:30 pm Rally @ CSU Northridge Sierra Quad

Local Events

Oakland Unified District (OEA)

• 7:30 a.m. Informational picketing in defense of public education and against cuts
• 9:15 a.m. Districtwide mock “Disaster Drill” (as in “California’s budget is a disaster!”)

(San Francisco, San Lorenzo, Dublin and other districts are holding mock drills.)

UC Berkeley

• 7 am-12 pm Pickets
• 12 pm-1 pm Rally/Action @ entrance to Sproul Plaza (Telegraph & Bancroft)
• 1 pm-3 pm March from UC Berkeley to Oakland’s Ogawa Plaza
• Students, faculty, workers and campus community will travel to San Francisco Regional Rally (See regional listing above)

UCLA

• 10 am Pickets
• 11:30 am Walk Out
• 12 pm Rally @ Bruin Plaza

(UCLA invites high schools and community colleges in the Westside area to join)

UC San Diego

• 11:30 Walk-out & Rally @ Gilman Parking Structure
• 12:30 pm March from Gilman to the Silent Tree outside Giesel Library and Rally there
• Students, faculty, workers and campus community will travel to San Diego Regional Rally (See regional listing above)

UC Santa Cruz

• 6:00 am Picket at the entrances to campus
• 9:00 am Rally @ main entrance to the campus (Bay and High)
• 12:00 pm Rally @ main entrance to the campus (Bay and High)
• 5:00 pm General Assembly @ main entrance to campus (Bay and High)

UC Riverside

• 1 pm gathering @ UCR Bell Tower
• 2:30 pm March from UCR to downtown
• 3:30 pm Rally @ University Ave and Market St. (Downtown Riverside)

DVC -

• 12pm Walkout : Other events on campus TBD
• Meet up with rally in Oakland’s Ogawa Plaza

City College of SF

•12pm (main campus) Rally and events all day on campus
•12pm (Mission campus) – on campus events – meet up with 3:00 rally @ 24th & Mission

Skyline/Cañada/Peninsula College

• Walkouts @10:00am other campus events

Ocean HS

• Teachers and students to march and rally along California Highway 1

De Anza CC

•12pm to walk out and rally in SF at 5 p.m..

Skyline CC, San Mateo County,

• 11 a.m. Rally
• 12pm Walkout at Noon, carpool to SF 5 p.m. Rally.

San Francisco Sate

• 7 am Campus Shutdown; Pickets from morning till 1pm; all day campus events TBD
• 1pm Students, faculty, workers and campus community will travel to San Francisco Regional Rally (See regional listing above)

Sonoma State

• 11:30 am Student Walk Out
• 12:00 pm-1:30 pm Rally near Stevenson Quad

CSU Bakersfield

• 11:30 am-1 pm @ the Student Union Patio (rain: Stockdale Room in Runner Café)

CSU Channel Islands

• Students, faculty, workers and campus community will travel to the San Fernando Valley to participate in San Fernando Valley Regional Rally @ CSU Northridge (See regional listing above)

CSU Chico

• 8 am sendoff for students, faculty, workers and campus community traveling to State Capital Rally (See regional listing above)

CSU Dominguez Hills

• Students, faculty, workers and campus community will travel to Wilson High School Long Beach and Los Angeles Regional Rally (See Long Beach details below or regional listing above)
• 11 am-1 pm students hold a fair on CSUDH East Walkway (Games to learn about public education costs, access and quality)

CSU East Bay

• 8-10 Pickets on both entrances
• 11AM–Walkout of classes
• 11-1 pm Rally/Open Mic/Speack Out @ Agora Stage
• 1PM March to Warren Hall to present student demands
• Students, faculty, workers and campus community will travel to San Francisco to join Civic Center Rally

Fresno State

• 10:30 am March from NW corner of Blackstone and Shaw, go down Shaw to Fresno State
• 12 pm-1 pm Rally @ Peace Garden

CSU Fullerton

• Students, faculty, workers and campus community will travel to Los Angeles Regional Rally (See regional listing above)

Humboldt State

• 3 pm-5 pm Rally @ Humboldt County Courthouse-Eureka with CSU and K-12 faculty and students

Cal State Los Angeles

• 9:30 am Rally @ the USU area (Free Speech area)
• 2 pm March to Los Angeles Regional Rally (See regional listing above)

CSU Long Beach

• 12 pm-1 pm Rally @ South Campus, Upper Quad,
• 1 pm-2 pm Parade
• 4 pm Rally with K-12 and Community College (see below)

Long Beach: Wilson High School

• 4 pm Rally @ Wilson High School Gymnasium (4400 E. 10th St.)
• Music by Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave, The Nightwatchman)

California Maritime Academy

• Students, faculty, workers and campus community will travel to San Francisco Regional Rally and Sacramento/State Capitol Rally (See regional listing above)
• 12 pm Street Theatre/Mock “Die-In” @ Maritime’s main quad

CSU Monterey Bay

• 11 am-1 pm Rally/March
• Followed by car-pools to Community Rally
• 4 pm Community Rally @ Colton Hall (570 Pacific St. between Madison & Jefferson)
- Contact: Kat General, 415-728-8927

CSU Northridge/San Fernando Valley Regional Rally

• 3:45 pm gather @ CSU Northridge Sierra Quad
• 4:15 pm March
• 5 pm Hands around CSUN
• 5:30 pm Rally @ CSU Northridge Sierra Quad

Cal Poly Pomona

• 1:30 pm- 2:30 pm Send off Rally @ – as CFA members, students and campus community board buses for Los Angeles Regional Rally (See regional listing above)

Sacramento State/Sacramento/State Capitol Rally

• 11 am-1 pm Rally @ State Capitol (North Steps of Capitol)
- Contact: Kevin Wehr, 916-541-2125

CSU San Bernardino

• 11:30 am March @ Marquee entrance (NW corner of University Pkwy and Northpark Blvd)
• 12 pm Rally @ Pfau Library

San Diego State/San Diego Regional Rally

• 11:30 am-12:00 pm collect video testimonials from students and campus community next to Aztec Center (Large “scoreboard” showing the loss of students, teachers and classes at SDSU due to budget cuts)
• 12:00 pm Rally by Aztec Center
• Students, faculty, workers and campus community will travel to San Diego Regional Rally (See regional listing above)

SANTEE HIGH SCHOOL, LOS ANGELES
March 4 Walk Out. ALSO: February 26 plans for sit-ins with other high schools in the LA area. Sponsored by Students Enforcing Educational Demands,(S.E.E.D) Contact: Julia Wallace LA March 4th Committee, 310-404-6729

RANCHO COTATI HIGH SCHOOL, SONOMA COUNTY
7 am-Start of school: Flyer distribution to parents. 3 pm gather in high school parking lot for a march to 4:45 pm rally at Commerce & Expressway. Sponsor: Rohnert Park-Cotati Educators Association.
Contact Mark Galipeau 707 321 4532. red72impala@yahoo.com

SAN DIEGO CITY COLLEGE
March 4 walkout at San Diego City College begins 11 am. Meet at the Gorton Quad. At 3 pm the group will join with the rest of San Diego at the Centro Cultural de la Raza to march on the Governor’s office (see below). Contact: 562-665-3759
Or view the Facebook group

MT. SAC COLLEGE, LOS ANGELES COUNTY
Demonstration to Save Public Education 1:30 PM Free Speech Area, For more information contact: 562-665-3759
Or view the Facebook group

RANCHO COTATI HIGH SCHOOL, SONOMA COUNTY
7 am-Start of school: Flyer distribution to parents. 3 pm gather in high school parking lot for a march to 4:45 pm rally at Commerce & Expressway. Sponsor: Rohnert Park-Cotati Educators Association.
Contact Mark Galipeau 707 321 4532. red72impala@yahoo.com

SAN DIEGO CITY COLLEGE
March 4 walkout at San Diego City College begins 11 am. Meet at the Gorton Quad. At 3 pm the group will join with the rest of San Diego at the Centro Cultural de la Raza to march on the Governor’s office (see below). Contact: 562-665-3759
Or view the Facebook group

MT. SAC COLLEGE, LOS ANGELES COUNTY
Demonstration to Save Public Education 1:30 PM Free Speech Area, For more information contact: 562-665-3759
Or view the Facebook group

San Jose State

• 11 am gather at San Jose City Hall
• 11:45 am March to San Jose State Tower Lawn (7th Street Plaza entrance)
• 12 pm Rally @ San Jose State Tower Lawn

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

• 3:30–5 pm Rally @ Office of state Senator Abel Maldonado (1356 Marsh St., San Luis Obispo)

CSU San Marcos

• 10:30 am-11:30 am Teach-in on State Budget @ Academic Hall (ACD) 102 (simulcast to other classrooms)
• 12 pm-1 pm Rally @ Kellogg Library

CSU Stanislaus

• 11:30 am-1pm Rally @ campus Quad

Nationwide See www.defendeducation.org.

DETROIT (Wayne State University)

•4pm Rally at Gullen Mall on WSU Campus
•4pm March to Cadillac Plaza and Detroit Public Schools Headquarters
•Picket and Rally Outside Cadillac Plaza and the Fisher Building (Grand Blvd. & 2nd Ave.) — 5 p.m.
Join us on March 4 for a march and rally from Wayne State University to the New Center.

Alabama University, Montgomery

Statewide event 10:00am – 2:00pm Alabama State House, Montgomery, AL Students, faculty, staff and other supporters to visit Montgomery and take part in a huge Higher Ed Day Rally that allows rally participants to voice their support for
higher education. 2,000 plus expected to attend the festivities to create a
real-life “visual” for lawmakers about the public support for Alabama’s 15 public universities.
Facebook page

Central Connecticut State University
New Britain, CT
Take a Stand! Defend Public Education and Education Rights!
Facebook page

Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana Teach-In & Rally
Website: www.lsustrike.wordpress.com
Email: lsustrike@yahoo.com

University of Massachusetts, Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd, Boston, MA Mass
Email: StudentsUnitingUMB@gmail.com
Facebook group

NEW YORK CITY REGIONAL ACTIONS ON MARCH 4

NYC region events listings
http://march4ny.wordpress.com/

Rally at City Hall: Shut Down City Hall Not Our Schools!
1 pm, New York City Hall Organized by the Coalition for Public Education/Coalición por la Educación Pública and Concerned Advocates for Public Education

March 4 Protest: Governor Patterson’s Office to the MTA Headquarters
4 – 6 pm, gather at 633 3rd Ave (between 40th and 41st Sts.) Join students, educators, concerned parents and community members as we protest the cuts to K-12 and higher education. Sponsor March 4 NY Day to Defend Education.

On Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=270871459701http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=244000051960

Walkout at Hunter College
1 pm Contact: HunterMarch4th@gmail.com

Rally at Queens College
1:50-2:50 pm Participants include: STAND, QC Anti-War Coalition, Political Science Club, NYPIRG, Democratic Student Alliance

Rally at CUNY Graduate Center
4 pm 365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St. Then March to Parterson’s Office and the MTA Organized by The Adjunct Project

MICHIGAN REGIONAL ACTION ON MARCH 4
Statewide March on Lansing, State Capitol 11 am: Gather at the Capitol Steps & March, Noon Rally at Capitol Steps
More Info

MINNESOTA
Noon Rally at Morrill Hall and march around/through campus.umnsds.wordpress.com

RHODE ISLAND

REGIONAL ACTION ON MARCH 4

S.O.S. Save Our Schools Coalition 3-4 pm Rally at Providence School Dept., 787 Westminster Ave. 4 pm March through downtown and 5 pm Rally at City Hall Contact: Bill Bateman 401-837-7663 / 401-572-3740

Providence College
Save Our Schools Coalition, Co-sponsored by the RI Unemployed Council
3-4 pm Rally at Providence School Dept., 787 Westminster Ave.
4pm March through downtown 5 pm Rally at City Hall
Contact person: Bill Bateman, liberator@cox.net, 401-837-7663

University of Texas, Austin
Stop the Cuts Coalition
Facebook page

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Planning protests on March 4 • nobudgetcutsuw.blogspot.com/

International

Portugal

Public sector workers in Portugal have called a one-day national strike on March 4 in protest over a wage freeze.

*Compiled by Jonathan and Juan, www.calfac.org/march4.html

In case any of you dear readers were under the impression that AK Press is any sort of glamorous place, check out what we’ve been up to this weekend! Those of you who have worked retail are no doubt familiar with the tedious yet essential task of doing physical inventory. Well, this weekend, your intrepid AK Press Collective (along with our trusty band of volunteers) has once again risen to the task!

I won’t get into the details, because contrary to the title of this post (I was lying to draw you in, see!), it’s really not that exciting. It’s basically three days of counting every copy of every item on every shelf by hand (and that’s, you know, several thousand items). The more acrobatically inclined among us spent a couple of days hopping around between raised pallet shelves, digging through cases of overstock. There was a lot of sneezing and a few minor injuries, but mostly it went pretty smoothly. Then Lorna entered all our counts and had a big beer to celebrate our success. At the end of it all, we are exhausted but we have a database (hopefully) full of nice, clean data. We love it!

One kind of fun(ny) thing about inventory is that we always seem to rediscover things in the warehouse that we’d all forgotten we had. So, keep an eye on our sale page, cause I bet some of this overstock turns up there soon. Inventory is also a pretty good chance for those of us who deal with these books all the time (and sometimes forget how much good stuff there is) to actually get up close and look at all the stuff we’re selling. There really is a lot of good shit in our warehouse, and I encourage those of you who are local to the bay area to come and poke around for yourselves. Better yet, come and start volunteering at AK… then you can help us with all the warehouse organization we’ve just been inspired to do, and next year you can do inventory like the cool kids!

Zach counts pamphlets. Macio climbs the pallet shelves. Lorna celebrates…and expresses herself.

(The next installation in our ongoing series of dispatches from the mountains of West Virginia, where the battle against mountaintop removal continues to escalate. AK Press will publish Mountain Justice: Homegrown Resistance to Mountaintop Removal, for the Future of Us All, by journalist Tricia Shapiro, this Fall.)

Escalating Sanctions against Mountaintop Removal Protesters

“Protesters Occupy Marfork Coal Co.’s Office in Response to Mounting Violations,” said a press release from the protesters’ supporters at Climate Ground Zero on Thursday morning, Feb. 18.

A news release from Massey Energy, Marfork’s parent company, told rather a different story: “Environmental Terrorists Invade Marfork Coal Company Office…. Three criminals clad in fatigues and carrying chains invaded a company office and chained themselves to chairs in the lobby. A terrified receptionist went into shock and was transported by ambulance to a local hospital…. One of the criminals, Mike Roselle, was a founding member of Earth First!, which is considered by many to be a domestic terrorist group…. These domestic terrorists are part of an anti-coal group that wants to shut down mining in Appalachia and destroy West Virginia’s economy.”

Massey’s “news release” doesn’t specify who those “many” are who consider Mike and his colleagues to be “domestic terrorists.” But even right-wing activist Ron Arnold, who’s written an entire book on “ecoterrorism,” asserts that “Roselle may be a terrible pain in the ass, but he’s no terrorist.” Writing shortly after Mike’s first trespassing arrest on Massey property, at Marfork’s Bee Tree strip mine site a year ago, Arnold scolded those who would “dilute” the meaning of the word terrorism by applying it to nonviolent protest.

“Face it,” he wrote, “what he did was civil disobedience, not terrorism.”

The claim that “a terrified receptionist went into shock” is equally puzzling. “She was definitely startled when we came in,” says Joe Hamsher, one of the three protesters arrested that day. But soon “she calmed down. She was even laughing.”

Protests are not a new experience for Massey workers. Since February of last year, more than 130 arrests have been made at civil-disobedience actions protesting mountaintop-removal (MTR) strip mining for coal in West Virginia. Several of those actions have targeted Marfork, which has begun blasting at its Bee Tree MTR site a short distance from its enormous Brushy Fork impoundment, which holds billions of gallons of liquid coal waste up above the Coal River valley. Anti-MTR activists and local residents are concerned that blasting so close to the impoundment, which is built over abandoned underground coal mine tunnels, risks catastrophic flooding that by Massey’s own estimate could kill close to a thousand people.

The only violence or threats of violence at any of these actions have been directed at the protesters, not vice versa. For example, at a protest rally at the front gate of Massey’s Goals Coal facility last June, a Massey supporter slapped anti-MTR activist Judy Bonds hard enough that she couldn’t move her neck properly for days. Most recently, in January, workers at Marfork’s Bee Tree site blared multiple airhorns, day and night, at three protesters sitting in trees there, risking permanent damage to the protesters’ hearing. At a previous tree sit, last summer, a sitter was threatened with gang rape.

“We were definitely not much of a threat to her,” Joe Hamsher says, referring to the receptionist at the Marfork office. “I mean, we were locked down.” Joe, the first of the three to enter the building that morning, announced “this is a protest,” then immediately sat down and locked himself to a chair. (That’s why they were carrying chains.)

Meanwhile, Mike Roselle posted a sign reading “CLOSED: Stop the Blasting!” on the building’s front door. A Marfork employee tore the sign down, while the third protester, Tom Smyth, took pictures. Then Mike and Tom entered the building and sat down near Joe. Tom chained himself to his chair.

The three protesters had brought with them a “citizen’s arrest warrant” for Marfork’s president. “Since 1994,” the warrant read, “the Marfork Coal Company has committed over 100 documented permit violations…. Marfork’s continued operations in such close proximity to both Marsh Fork Elementary and the Pettus Head Start Program are not only endangering, but also assaulting the children at these locations with coal dust and other particulates floating off of the mine sites owned by Marfork Coal…. Marfork is continuing its operations on the Bee Tree Strip Mine, placing nearby communities in imminent danger. As President of the Marfork Coal Company, you are responsible for the illegal practices of Marfork. Given the absence of any intervention from West Virginia or federal law enforcement, a citizen’s warrant has been issued for your, Christopher L. Blanchard’s, arrest.”

Two hours after the protesters arrived, state police took them away to jail. (When they left, the allegedly terrified receptionist was still at work, showing no ill effects, Joe notes.) The three were charged with trespass, obstruction, and conspiracy– all misdemeanors. Bail was set for Joe and Tom at $5,000 each, for Mike at $7,500. The magistrate specified that the arrestees would have to raise the entire $17,500 in cash, rather than paying a bail bondsman a small fraction of the money, typically 10 percent.

(Nice, artsy video from Climate Ground Zero of the occupation.)

The Massey “news release” cited above quotes the company’s chairman and CEO, Don Blankenship, saying: “These criminals have been allowed to become more and more aggressive with little repercussion.”

In fact, the “repercussion” against anti-MTR protesters in West Virginia has escalated dramatically over the past year. Early on, protesters arrested for trespassing were simply ticketed and released. Now, they’re sent to jail and required to raise large sums of bail money. Even accused murdererers and child molesters are typically permitted to use the services of a bail bondsman, to reduce the amount of cash they have to muster to get out of jail before trial. But West Virginia magistrates are now typically specifying large cash-only
bonds for civil-disobedience arrestees at anti-MTR protests. This has resulted in protesters being kept in jail after their arrests, but before any trial, sometimes for many days, far longer than the norm for such nonviolent offenses. (Of the three Marfork protesters, Joe was bonded out after eight days in custody. Tom and Mike remained in jail.) When protest cases do come to trial, the fines assessed have generally been increasing as well.

In addition to these escalating sanctions in criminal court, Massey lawyers have filed multiple civil suits against protesters arrested on their property. Lawsuits demanding injunctions and so-far unspecified money for “damages” have been filed against dozens of these protesters: one suit in Raleigh County against participants in several protests there early in 2009, one suit in Boone County against participants in an action there, and a separate Raleigh County suit against participants in a tree-sit action last summer. Protesters not actually named in any of these suits have been found in contempt of a court’s injunction for “acting in concert” with one of a suit’s named parties; that ruling is currently being appealed. In addition, Massey recently filed suit in federal court against participants in the January tree-sit protest at Marfork, requesting at least the minimum of $75,000 in damages that would make such a case eligible for federal
court.

At a hearing for the federal lawsuit on Tuesday, Feb. 23, Massey attorney Sam Brock said that activists protesting against Massey “just have to live by the same rules as everybody else.” Sitting in the courtroom that day, I remembered Massey’s 2008 settlement with the federal EPA for thousands of permit violations related to the Clean Water Act: Massey agreed to pay $20 million, although given the number and nature of the violations the EPA could properly have assessed $2 billion or more–100 times as much. (Massey’s own estimate of this prior to the settlement was $1.5 to $7 billion.) Furthermore, just a few weeks ago, in January, a coalition of environmental groups announcing their intent to sue Massey cited documentation that the company’s permit violations had become even more frequent since the EPA settlement.

Would an even-handed application of “the same rules” allow protesters to commit, say, 99 (or more) civil-disobedience actions with impunity before being arrested for one of them?

“While Massey’s lawyers were in court today trying to enjoin anyone anywhere from trespassing on Massey operations,” Vern Haltom, co-director of Coal River Mountain Watch, noted later that day, “Massey was spilling black water [coal waste] from their Martin County, KY, operation. And Pioneer Fuels (NOT a Massey subsidiary) was spilling black water into Clear Fork,” which empties into the Coal River near Marfork’s headquarters, upstream from the town of Whitesville’s public water intake.

“Unfortunately,” Vern says, “our regulators don’t escalate the enforcement of Massey’s repeating violations that are endangering the community with the same vigor that prosecutors and Massey attorneys are suppressing the voices of endangered people,”

CRMW’s other co-director Judy Bonds, 2003 winner of the Goldman Environmental prize and a lifelong resident of Coal River valley, puts it more bluntly: “I believe the justice system in southern West Virginia is discriminatory in favor of the coal industry. I think keep screaming about it is all we can do.”

——————————

Tricia Shapiro has been covering anti-MTR activism as an embedded freelance writer since 2005. Her book Mountain Justice: Homegrown Resistance to Mountaintop Removal, for the Future of Us All will be published by AK Press this fall.

The Guardian printed another obituary of Colin Ward earlier this week. A nice tribute to a wonderful man.

—

Colin Ward obituary
by Ken Worpole

Writer, social theorist and anarchist who believed in self-sufficiency, allotments and better town planning.

Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, lived with the title of Britain’s most famous anarchist for nearly half a ­century, bemused by this ambivalent soubriquet. In Anarchy in Action (1973), he set out his belief that an anarchist society was not an end goal. Following Alexander Herzen, the writer and thinker known as the “father of ­Russian socialism”, Colin saw all distant goals as a form of tyranny and believed that anarchist principles could be ­discerned in everyday human relations and impulses. Within this perspective, politics was about strengthening ­co-operative ­relations and supporting human ingenuity in its myriad vernacular and everyday forms.

One of Colin’s favourite metaphors—adopted from a novel by Ignazio Silone—was the image of the seed beneath the snow, which suggested to him that anarchist principles were ever alive and prescient. He thought it was the work of politics to nurture such beliefs and to support them through small-scale initiatives, avoiding the temptation to replicate or scale them up to a level beyond which professional bureaucracies take over. He was fond of contrasting the vocabulary of self-organisation, with its friendly societies, mutuals, ­co-operatives and voluntary associations, with the nomenclature of the state and private sectors with their directorates, corporations, boards and executives.

Colin was the author of almost 30 books on subjects that ranged from allotments, architecture, self-build housing, ­children’s play, education, postcards and town planning to water distribution and anarchist theory, many of which gained him an international ­following. His book The Child in the City (1978), frequently reprinted, influenced planners and teachers from ­Liverpool to Latin America. Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (1984), written with planner Dennis Hardy, opened up a whole new field in 20th-century social history around self-organised communities and the ­Lockeian belief in the democratic importance of experiments in living. Another book, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1988), with David Crouch, held the line for this uniquely friendly form of local self-sufficiency during the barren years of centralised land use planning, making Colin a hero of today’s environmental activists, including the young George Monbiot.

Colin was born in Wanstead, Essex, the son of a teacher and a shorthand typist. Both were Labour supporters and Colin remembered hearing the anarchist Emma Goldman speak at a 1938 London May Day rally, and attending the 1939 Festival of Music for the People, in aid of the International Brigades, featuring Benjamin Britten’s Ballad of Heroes. On leaving school aged 15, Colin went to work for the architect Sidney Caulfield. Conscripted in 1942, Colin was posted to Glasgow, where he fell in with the city’s lively anarchist movement. He was then transferred to Orkney and Shetland for the remainder of the war. In 1945, as a subscriber to the radical newspaper War Commentary, Colin was summoned as a witness at the Old Bailey trial of the paper’s editors, John Hewetson, Vernon Richards and Philip Sansom, who were accused of promoting disaffection and received prison sentences.

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, while working for the architect Peter ­Shepheard, he wrote and edited articles for Freedom, the anarchist newspaper, where he developed the abiding themes of his life. He subsequently edited the journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970.

In his editorial and political work, he befriended and cultivated younger activists and writers such as Hugh Brody, Stan Cohen, Ray Gosling, Tony Gould, Richard Mabey, Carole Pateman, Kate Soper, Laurie Taylor and Jock Young. Many of these went on to write for the newly established weekly, New Society, an intellectual home that came ready-furnished as a result of Colin’s widening influence at this time.

In 1966, he had married Harriet Unwin, a young widow with two children, Tom and Barney, and in 1968 they had a son together, Ben. Colin also acted as a guardian to two other boys, Alan and Doug Balfour, after the Balfours’ mother died. This companionable, happy marriage of kindred spirits was longlasting. Colin and Harriet ­subsequently established a network of international friendships, first from their home in London and, latterly, in Suffolk—Colin spent a small fortune on photocopying in the local public library—as well as by telephone.

While working as an education officer for the Town and Country Planning Association between 1971 and 1979 he wrote Streetwork: The Exploding School (1973), with Tony Fyson, and ­established the Bulletin for Environmental Education. The point of both initiatives was to help get children out of school and into their communities, to talk to local people, and explore their neighbourhood, its amenities and utilities, and understand how buildings, streets, ­landscapes and social life interact. This led to Colin’s focus on the unique world of childhood which, in the end, may prove to have been his—and anarchism’s—most enduring contribution to social policy.

There were many other collaborations. With the novelist Ruth Rendell, Colin wrote a Counterblast pamphlet in 1989, Undermining the Central Line, in favour of a revitalised local democracy; in 1998 he produced Sociable Cities: Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, with the urbanist Peter Hall, to commemorate the centenary of Howard’s seminal work on garden cities. In 2003, the film-maker Mike Dibb recorded Colin in conversation with the writer Roger Deakin, at the Wards’ home in Debenham. This is available on DVD. To see Deakin (who died in 2006) and Colin together, talking freely of the delights of the natural world and the varied people in it, is to be reminded of a politics of life and possibility that stubbornly refuses to go away.

Colin is survived by Harriet, his son, stepchildren and wards.

• Colin Ward, author and social theorist, born 14 August 1924; died 11 February 2010

Hello one and all,

In our infinite wisdom, we here at AK have decided to offer a rotating special on different AK Press published titles each month. It is what I like to think of as the “You should have bought this when it came out, but you put it off, and now you are being rewarded because it is finally on sale” Sale, and other people think of as “A Sale on AK Backlist.” Whose is more appealing? (This is a rhetorical question so please don’t tell me what I don’t want to hear.) Each month we’ll be offering a selection of titles at 50% off the regular list price. (Yes, stores, for you too!). We’ve announced these titles on sale in a couple of emails, but I just realized that, though you should be, some of you may not be signed up for those. There’s still a week for the discount! February’s little beauties are, in alphabetical order (to avoid the appearance of favouritism):

A New World in Our Hearts: 8 Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, edited by Roy San Filippo

This book keeps alive the many key political contributions Love and Rage made to debates surrounding anarchism and organization, race, white supremacy, and the national question, as well as documenting the rise and fall of an important political movement. Now just $6!

Controlled Flight into Terrain: Stealworks Anthology 3.0, by John Yates

John is a San Francisco Bay Area independent designer, whose work has appeared for years within the underground music and political scenes. Through such work as his “Democracy We Deliver,” “Officer Friendly?” and Mom, We’re Home!”, Yates has gained a somewhat precarious notoriety within both the counter and over-the-counter cultures. Speaking of which, we’ll have some new shirts of his by mid-March! Now just $5.50! May as well get 2!

For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton, by Maurice Brinton (Christopher Pallis)

The most prolific contributor to the British Solidarity Group (1961¬1992), Maurice Brinton sought to inspire a mass movement based on libertarian socialist politics. Attempting to blow away the bad air of the “Old” and “New” Left alike, Brinton used the past as a guide to his visionary writings. Highly recommended!! Now just $11!

Granny Made Me an Anarchist: General Franco, the Angry Brigade, and Me, by Stuart Christie

Oh, what can we say about this! Love this book. Stuart Christie became Britain’s most famous anarchist in 1964 when he was arrested for smuggling explosives in a plot to assassinate Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco. Charged with “Banditry and Terrorism,” he served three years of his twenty-year sentence before international pressure (from Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre among many others), as well as a note from his Mum, secured his release. Five years later, he stood trial in London for alleged involvement with Britain’s Angry Brigade. Now just $10!

Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, by George Katsiaficas

The Subversion of Politics fills in the gaps between the momentous events of 1968 and 1999. Katsiaficas presents the protagonists of social revolt—Italian feminists, squatters, disarmament and anti-nuclear activists, punk rockers, and anti-fascist street fighters—in a compelling and sympathetic light.. At the same time, he offers a work of great critical depth, drawing from these political practices a new theory of freedom and autonomy that redefines the parameters of the political itself. Now just $9!

Suffled How it Gush: A North American Anarchist in the Balkans, by Shon Meckfessel

Shon Meckfessel, AKA “the fourth hiker,” appropriates the peculiar slogan of an Albanian mineral water company as the title for this uniquely intellectual book. Equal parts journalism, history, and personal memoir, Suffled How it Gush records Shon’s travels throughout ex-Yugoslavia and the greater Balkans region, chronicling the beauty of an area too renowned for its ugliness. Now just $8.50!

What is Anarchism, by Alexander Berkman

You thought it was just going to be books by young whippersnappers, didn’t you? A reprint of perhaps the first and best exposition of anarchism by one of its greatest propagandists (by both word and deed) and thinkers. In a clear conversation with the reader, Berkman discusses society as it now exists, the need for anarchism, and the methods for bringing it about. Necessary! Now just $7.00!

The editors of AK’s brand-new Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex have started promoting this important new critique of modern-era McCarthyism on our university campuses, and are calling for all folks concerned with the preservation of the freedom to speak and think as an autonomous individual in higher education to organize events around the book. If you’re on the East Coast, you might want to check out one of these two events organized by editor Anthony Nocella. Or, if you’re interested in organizing your own release events for Academic Repression, get in contact with the editors here: http://www.myspace.com/academicrepression. You’ll find a full list of contributors to the book on the MySpace page, plus info on other events coming up in the next few weeks! Be sure to check it out!

“This courageous and chilling book reminds us that the Academy is always a context for intellectual exchange and political struggle. Don’t miss it!” –Cornel West, Princeton University

***

Book Release Party: Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic Industrial Complex

Thursday, March 4, 7-8:30 p.m. Grewen Auditorium, Grewen Hall, Le Moyne College, NY

Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic Industrial Complex addresses the ways in which political elites, the mass media, and the education system establish and police the parameters of acceptable discourse. Throughout this anthology, prominent academics address the numerous debates that have occurred over free speech, culture wars and academic freedom.

Contributors to the book who will speak at the event include: Anthony J. Nocella, II of Le Moyne College, Peter Castro, Ph.D., Micere Githae Mugo, Ph.D., Mark Rupert, Ph.D., and Liat Ben-Moshe of Syracuse University, and Caroline Kaltefleiter, Ph.D. of the State University of New York at Cortland. Following the event, copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. This event is free and open to the public.

It is sponsored by the Center for Urban and Regional Applied Research, Department of Anthropology, Criminology and Sociology, and the Office of Service Learning. For more information, call (315)657-2911.

———————————————————
Book Talk: Academic Repression: Reflections on the Academic Industrial Complex

Saturday March 6th 7:00PM
with co-editor Anthony J. Nocella, II
@ Wooden Shoe Books
704 South Street
Philadelphia PA 19147
215-413-0999
sabot@woodenshoebooks.com
www.woodenshoebooks.com

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has pressured universities to hand over faculty, staff, and student work to be flagged for potential threats. Numerous books have addressed the question of academic freedom over the years; this collection asks whether the concept of academic freedom still exists at all in the American university system. It addresses not only overt attacks on critical thinking, but also–following trends unfolding for decades–engages the broad socioeconomic determinants of academic culture.

This edited anthology brings together prominent academics writing hard-hitting essays on free speech, culture wars, and academic freedom in a post-9/11 era. It’s a powerful response to attacks on critical thinking in our universities by well-respected scholars and academics, including Joy James, Henry Giroux, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Robert Jensen, Ward Churchill, and many more..

“Essential reading for anyone concerned about the stifling of dissent and free expression in academia and beyond.”–Uri Gordon, author of Anarchy Alive!

Anthony J. Nocella, II, author, activist, education, is a professor in Sociology and Criminology at SUNY Cortland and Le Moyne College. He also is a life skills teacher at Hillbrook Youth Detention Center promoting nonviolence and group-building skills. He is a co-founder of more than fifteen active social/political organizations, four active scholarly journals, is board member of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), has published more than twenty-five scholarly articles and is working on his eleventh book, Global Industrial Complex (Lexington Books, coming soon). His other books include A Peacemaker’s Guide for Building Peace with a Revolutionary Group (PARC, 2004), co-editor of Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (Lantern Books, 2004); and co-editor of Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press, 2006). www.anthonynocella.org

In the world of publishing, it’s sometimes kind of staggering to realize how far in advance we have to announce a new season of books. The book trade generally works 8 - 12 months in advance … which frequently requires a lot of creative thinking about how a list of books that’s going to be ready for printing might come together, and, frequently, a really big leap of faith, and a lot of crossed fingers, that a manuscript that is close to being finished will actually be finished on time. As you might have noticed on one or two occasions, we’re sometimes overly optimistic on that front!

Nonetheless! The collective agreed on an awesome list of books for the Fall 2010 season (books to be released between September 2010 & March 2011), and over the course of the past couple of weeks, Zach and Charles and I have been driving ourselves crazy pulling together covers, page counts, prices, release dates, and advance descriptions. And now you get to see it first! Even Amazon doesn’t have this info yet … don’t you feel special?

Seriously, some great books in here. We’re excited about the Fall season - and the rest of the Spring 2010 season! - so read on below, and be sure to keep an eye out for these titles as they become available throughout the year!

The AK Press Fall 2010 Season

Mountain Justice: Homegrown Resistance to Mountaintop Removal, for the Future of Us All, by Tricia Shapiro

Mountain Justice tells a terrific set of firsthand stories about living with MTR and offers on-the-scene—and behind-the-scenes—reporting of what people are doing to try to stop it. Shapiro lets the victims of mountaintop removal and their allies tell their own stories, allowing moments of quiet dignity and righteous indignation to share center-stage. Includes coverage of the sharp escalation of anti-MTR civil disobedience, with more than 130 arrests in West Virginia alone, during the first year of the Obama administration.

“Shapiro is one of the few writers on this subject that actually understands the strategy, the tactics, and the internal politics of a dynamic and growing movement. This is environmental journalism at it best.”—Mike Roselle, Earth First! founder and author of Tree Spiker

Tricia Shapiro has been closely following and writing about efforts to end large-scale strip mining for coal in Appalachia since 2004. She now lives on a remote mountain homestead in western North Carolina, near the Tennessee border.

September 2010 | 360 pages | $17.95

***

“Yellow Kid” Weil: The Autobiography of America’s Master Swindler, by J.R. Weil

Bilked bankers, grifted gamblers, and swindled spinsters. Welcome to the world of confidence men.

You’ll marvel at the elaborate schemes developed by The Yellow Kid and cry for the marks who lost it all to his ingenuity—$8,000,000 by some estimations. Fixed horse races, bad real-estate deals, even a money-making machine, were all tools of the trade for the Kid and his associates: The Swede, The Butterine Kid, The Harmony Kid, Fats Levine, and others. The Sting (1973), starring Paul Newman and based largely on the story of the Yellow Kid is entertaining, but no match for the real deal.

The triumphant return of the much-beloved Nabat Series!

February 2011 | 352 pages | $17.95

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Flash: A Novel, By Jim Miller

“’This remarkable novel is nothing less than a secret history of Southern California—a radical past that might yet redeem our future.”—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

A chance encounter with a faded Wanted! poster in a San Diego library sends journalist Jack Wilson on a wild adventure through southern California’s radical past. As Jack searches for the truth about I.W.W. outlaw Bobby Flash, he uncovers a hidden history of real-life revolutionaries … and learns a powerful lesson about the importance of family in the process.

The very first title in AK’s brand-new fiction line! Keep your eyes peeled for more great fiction titles coming your way in future seasons.

Jim Miller is a labor educator and activist in San Diego, California.

November 2010 | pages | $13.95

***

Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, by Marshall “Eddie” Conway

In 1970, the feds framed Eddie Conway for the murder of a Baltimore City Police officer. He was 24 years old. They threw him in prison, took him away from his family, his friends, and his organizing, and tried to relegate him to a life marked by nothing but legal appeals, riots and lockdowns, transfers from one penal colony to the next. But they failed.

Forty years later, still incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit, Eddie Conway continues to resist. Marshall Law is a poignant story of strength and struggle. From his childhood in inner-city Baltimore to his political awakening in the military, from the rise of the Black Panther Party to the sham trial, the realities of prison life, escape attempts, labor organizing on the inside, and beyond, Eddie’s autobiography is a reminder that we all share the responsibility of resistance, no matter where we are.

Marshall “Eddie” Conway is the former Minister of Defense of the Baltimore Black Panther Party. In 1969, he uncovered evidence of the FBI’s infiltration of the Panthers as a part of the COINTELPro initiative, and found himself locked away, just one year later, convicted of a murder he did not commit. Currently in his fortieth year of incarceration in a State of Maryland correctional facility, he has played a leading role in a variety of prisoner support initiatives, including the formation of the Maryland chapter of the United Prisoner’s Labor Union, and the ACLU’s Prison Committee to Correct Prison Conditions.

February 2011 | 232 pages | $15.95

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We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008, edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and Void Network

On December 6, 2008 the city of Athens exploded as people took to the streets to demonstrate their rage over the murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, bringing business as usual to a screeching, burning halt for three breathtaking weeks. This is the first book to delve into the Greek December and its aftermath, in the words of those who witnessed and participated in it. Interviews and personal reflections run alongside the communiqués and texts that circulated through the networks of revolt, shedding much-needed light—and dispelling destructive myths—on the real fabric of the Greek left that made December possible.

Note that this book will actually be available in just a few short weeks … and is available for preorder on our website! But, it’s officially a part of our Fall 2010 season.

March 2010 | 360 pages | $17.00

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Fear of an Animal Planet: The Secret History of Animal Resistance, by Jason Hribal

“Until the lion has his historian,” the African proverb goes, “the hunter will always be a hero.” Jason Hribal fulfills this promise and turns the world upside down. Taking the reader deep inside the circus, the zoo, and similar operations, it provides a window into hidden struggle and resistance that occurs daily. Chimpanzees escape their cages. Elephants attack their trainers. Orcas demand more food. Tigers refuse to perform. Indeed, these animals are rebelling with intent and purpose. They become true heroes and our understanding of them will never be the same.

The latest title in the ever-popular CounterPunch Series at AK Press.

Jason Hribal is an independent historian and adult educator.

December 2010 | 280 pages | $15.95

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Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States, edited by Team Colors Collective

From housing struggles to food politics, from poor people’s movements to radical art projects, from the Right to the City Alliance to the U.S. Social Forum, Uses of a Whirlwind explores the current composition of social movements in the United States. With equal emphasis placed on movement history and movement-building, Whirlwind is a call to action for a new decade of organizing. Contributors include Robin DG Kelley, Grace Lee Boggs, Michael Hardt, Chris Carlsson, Take Back the Land, Domestic Workers United, the Starbucks Workers Union, Brian Tokar, Dorothy Kidd, and Ashanti Alston.

The book launches this June at the US Social Forum in Detroit!

Team Colors is a geographically-dispersed militant research collective. The present collection is edited by Craig Hughes, Kevin van Meter, and Stevie Peace.

June 2010 | 352 pages | $19.95

***

Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures , 1960s to Now, edited by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee

Drawn from an exhibition at NYC’s Exit Art, Signs of Change is a visual archive of more than 350 posters, prints, photographs, films, songs, and ephemera from over twenty countries. From the rise of the reproducible poster to today’s digital instantaneity, it tackles the themes and representation of international struggles for equality, democracy, and freedom—as well as basic human rights, like food and shelter—and illustrates the incredible aesthetic range of radical movements over the past 50 years.

Long-awaited! Signs of Change won’t dissapoint …

Dara Greenwald is a doctoral student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Josh MacPhee is the editor of Realizing the Impossible.

September 2010 | 178 pages (full-color!) | $28.95

***

Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader, edited by Chris Wilbert and Damian White

“Britain’s leading anarchist philosopher.” —Anne Power, London School of Economics

Drawing inspiration from the everyday creativity of ordinary people, Colin Ward long championed a unique social and environmental politics premised on the possibilities of democratic self-organization and self management from below. This collection provides a wide-ranging overview of Ward’s earliest journalism, with seminal essays, extracts from his most important books as well as examples of his most recent work.

Chris Wilbert is a Lecturer in Geography / Tourism at Anglia Ruskin University.

Damian F. White is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Rhode Island School of Design.

January 2011 | 375 pages | $21.95

***

Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader, edited by Iain McKay

More influential than Marx during his lifetime, Proudon’s work has been long out of print or unavailable in English. Iain McKay’s comprehensive collection, is a much needed and timely historical corrective.

“An indispensable source book for anyone interested in Proudhon’s ideas and the origins of the socialist and anarchist movements in nineteenth-century Europe.” —Robert Graham, editor of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas

“Iain McKay’s introduction offers a sure-footed guide through the misconceptions surrounding Proudhon’s thought.”— Mark Leier, author of Bakunin: The Creative Passion

Published in honor of the 170th anniversary of Proudhon’s first use of the term “anarchist”!

Iain McKay is the author of An Anarchist FAQ.

December 2010 | 670 pages | $24.95

The erstwhile Indypendent, the organ of the NYC Independent Media Center, recently ran an interview of our (fairly) new release, You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of CLR James. You can read it below…and you should also check out the Indypendent’s web site here. They’re produced by a large network of volunteers and they do great work, producing a true alternative to corporate media, and reaching more than 200,000 readers! Check ‘em out.

*****

Your Own James: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James
By Rico Cleffi
From the February 19, 2010 issue of the Indypendent

You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James
AK Press, 2009
C.L.R. James and David Austin (editor)

Martin Glaberman, a longtime associate of C.L.R. James, once observed that the staggering scope of James’ writing often meant, “Everyone produces his/her own James. People have, over the years, taken from him what they found useful, and imputed to him what they found necessary. James as cultural critic, James as master of the classics, James as expert on cricket, James as historian, James as major figure in the pan-African movement….”

A cursory glance at You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, mostly a collection of talks delivered to a group of West Indian students living in Montreal from 1966 to 1967, shows the breadth of James’ interests (the book is supplemented with interviews with James and letters from, to and about the scholar). Among the topics discussed are Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire as it relates to the Caribbean; the Haitian Revolution, Shakespeare’s King Lear, the making of the Caribbean people, and Lenin’s views on labor unions.

James, a Marxist journalist, essayist and social theorist, is perhaps best known for his 1938 masterwork on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. He made it his life’s work to examine the movement of historical forces from below and the response of those in power to these efforts. Lectures “The Making of the Caribbean People” and “The Haitian Revolution and the Making of the Modern World,” both included in You Don’t Play with Revolution, revisit this theme, which, given the current tragedy in Haiti, is as important as ever. James ties together the ways slaves organized themselves in order to run the West Indian plantations, the amazing defeat of the British army at the hands of the Haitians in 1791, the Haitian revolution and its importance to the French Revolution. He extends the analysis to emphasize the role of the creative resistance of American slaves in inspiring the abolitionist movement.

A close study of Black Americans had helped James, who was born in 1901 in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British colony, arrive at some of his most important theoretical breakthroughs, particularly his rejection of the Leninist concept of the vanguard party. In 1938, at the behest of Leon Trotsky and his U.S. lieutenant James P. Cannon, James came to the United States from London largely to help the Socialist Workers Party determine its stance on the “Negro Question.” He came to the conclusion that American Blacks didn’t need to have a Leninist organization imposed on them and soon rejected the entire notion of the revolutionary vanguard.

James grapples with Lenin’s writings on labor as well. The book dedicates three chapters to James’ views on “Lenin and the Trade Union Debate in Russia,” which lays out a close reading of Lenin’s public statements on the need for workers’ autonomy. This view directly contradicted that of Trotsky, who argued for more bureaucracy and increased state control over workers’ organizations (and later for the militarization of the working class). It’s impossible to accept Lenin’s proclamations at face value — in practice, Lenin and the Bolsheviks beefed up the power of the Bolshevik party at the expense of the Soviets (workers’ councils) and other workers’ organizations. David Austin, the book’s editor, could have provided a note to clarify James’ apparent Lenin paradox — even though James rejected Lenin’s idea of the vanguard party, he believed that Lenin only used that organizational form out of necessity. Kent Worcester explains in his excellent C.L.R. James: A Political Biography, “A pronounced sympathy for Lenin’s own method and practice did not, it seems, preclude a break with a core proposition of Marxist-Leninist politics.”

Many of those James worked with or directly influenced attained some degree, however compromised, of state power — Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams and Jomo Kenyatta, the first prime ministers of Ghana, Trinidad and Kenya, respectively, maintained close contact with James throughout their political careers. None of these figures is dealt with uncritically here. Throughout the volume, James’ jabs at Williams, like his digs against Trotsky, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Isaac Deutscher, never come across as petty resentment. Through debating and arguing against these characters, he earned his stripes (and his snipes).

The spectrum of these lectures can be a bit daunting, but the book’s breadth makes the collection useful to both novices looking for a starting point and initiates alike. Still, the inclusion of a much-needed index at the expense of some of the correspondence between some of James’ obscure acolytes would have made the book easier to digest.

[You can find Rico Cleffi's original review here.]

Oh, and did we mention there’s yet another AK Press title on its way from the printer to our warehouse? And I mean that literally: It should be in a truck and nearing Oakland as I type.

The book is Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic-Industrial Complex. According to Cornel West, “This courageous and chilling book reminds us that the Academy is always a context for intellectual exchange and political struggle. Don’t miss it!”

Sure, a lot of books have addressed attacks on academic freedom over the years, but this collection asks whether the concept of academic freedom itself still exists at all in the American university system. It addresses not only overt attacks on critical thinking, but also—following trends unfolding for decades—engages the broad socioeconomic determinants of academic culture. It’s full of hard-hitting essays on free speech, culture wars, and academic “freedom” in a post-9/11 era. It’s a powerful response to attacks on critical thinking in our universities by scholars on the front lines of this ongoing battle, many of whom have experienced academic repression first-hand, including Michael Bérubé, Joy James, Henry Giroux, Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Robert Jensen, Cary Nelson, Ward Churchill, and many more.

And, for the next month, you can get it for 25% off!

To whet your appetite, here’s an excerpt: two, actually. One lifted from the beginning of and the other from near the end of the editors’ Introduction.

——

Introduction: The Rise of the Academic-Industrial Complex and the Crisis in Free Speech
by Steven Best, Anthony J. Nocella, II, and Peter McLaren

“[People] fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin—more even than death…. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of [humanity]” —Bertrand Russell “There follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the path of inquiry.” —Charles S. Peirce

Given that the academy is a microcosm of social life in the US, and this nation—as a hierarchical, exploitative capitalist society—has never been free or democratic in any meaningful way, we should not be surprised to find higher education to be a place of hierarchical domination, bureaucratic control, hostility to radical research and teaching, and anathema to free thinking. Since Socrates and the earliest inceptions of the university system in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, Western states and universities have attacked critical minds and kicked controversial and subversive figures out of the hallowed halls of learning, betraying the very mission of education and critical thinking that demands freedom of inquiry and speech.

Perhaps the largest myths to expose in our culture today still are freedom and democracy—institutional and personal conditions that are not only in steep decline in the current post-9/11 era, but in fact never existed in any significant form. The revolutionary experiment in democracy and equality launched in 1776 never had a chance, taking place as it did amidst the backdrop of the slavery of African people, the repression and impending genocide of the Native American peoples, the disenfranchisement of women, the institutionalization of people with disabilities, and the exploitation of working classes. The Founding Fathers never intended “democracy,” “freedom,” and “equality” to benefit anything but their own elite propertied interests, and history stayed faithful to their design. Despite the subversion of monarchy and aristocracy with the brash and impertinent notion of equality, the concept mainly functioned as an ideological smokescreen to mask a new form of hierarchy based on class domination, coupled with patriarchy, racism, and every other repulsive form of discrimination, subjugation, and violence. Notions such as “freedom” and “equality” hid the fact that the inherently hierarchical and exploitative corporate-state complex of capitalism was a system run by and for capitalists, corporations, and wealthy property owners. Big business and monopoly corporations commandeered the state—the oxymoronic institution of “representative democracy”—to advance and protect their own minority interests, to suppress majority opposition, and to quell dissent by any means necessary….

***

Neoliberalism and Academia

It was not paranoia that led John Dewey in the 1940s to warn that a corporatization process had begun whereby universities learned to shape and pattern themselves on a business model driven by the need to compete and turn education into a profit-making enterprise. Nor was it delusional when, in 1961, President Eisenhower warned that the “military industrial complex” posed a threat to the balance of powers and to civil liberties. The fusion of warfare, capitalism, science, and technology cannot take place without knowledge, advanced technologies, and a low-cost labor base, such as one finds ready-made in universities and their graduate student labor pools. Where science, engineering, and technology are crucial to capitalist militarism and militarist capitalism, universities form the third leg in a triadic system of postmodern power. It is a telling fact that the US spends more in the military sector than the rest of the world combined.

Consequently, deconstructing fictitious humanist ideals, describing the real goals and imperatives of “higher learning,” and delegitimizing the power systems that actually run universities, many theorists during the last two decades understood that the boundary lines between universities, corporations, and military/warfare/social policing systems were dissolving. They no longer saw three separate, unrelated entities, but rather one gigantic industrial complex. The term “academic-military-industrial complex” is shorthand for the intersection, overlapping, and implosion of universities, the corporate private sector, the Department of Defense and various armed forces services, and the security and regulatory apparatuses of the State—all knotted together in a vast, predatory bureaucratic system developed for social and geopolitical domination.1/2 By the 1990s, certainly, the questioning of scientific epistemology took on a far broader and more consequential term with critical scrutiny of the university institution itself, by charting the transformations of the mission and function of universities in the post-war era. Building on attacks on the politics of knowledge driving university research, a number of radical theorists, such as Stanley Aronowitz, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Sandra Harding, and numerous contributors to this book analyzed how the nobler purposes and missions of universities and institutions of “higher learning” became corrupted and degraded. Hence, a spate of important new critical works emerged deconstructing the mythology of higher education and the academy as an institution.

As capitalism changes, so must education, and the rise of science and technology to dominant “productive forces” in the postindustrial phase of capital transforms education increasingly from a focus on humanities to narrow functional knowledge. The noble functions of higher education such as inculcating critical thinking skills, identities as citizens and members of interdependent communities, and the ability to meaningfully participate in and shape a democratic form of government gave way to reconfiguring the university as a corporation, ideological state apparatus, and technical school for training laborers.

Universities had become part of the “one dimensional society” (Marcuse), they had the potential to devastatingly criticize and overturn in favor of richly educated, highly cultured, autonomous citizens. Increasingly, the humanities and liberal arts were eclipsed by science, chemistry, mathematics, agriculture, geology, engineering, marketing, business, accounting, advertising, and other fields including sports. The economic rationale to increase university profits and functional purpose of producing individuals trained for science, technology, and business had the ideological bonus of homogenizing thought and stifling critical thinking. And under conditions of economic recession such as began to devastate global markets in 2008, universities have to tighten budgets and reduce or eliminate “superfluous” knowledges. Simultaneously, students increasingly turn toward practical realities of careers and economic survival and forego the “luxury” of studying literature, philosophy, or art, fields that regardless are grossly underfunded as they occupy the bottom rung of budgetary priorities. As the 2008–2009 crisis worsened, plunging much of the globe into recession and depression, worried students fall in line with corporate academic policies that reduce or eliminate “superfluous” humanities requirements in order to peddle degrees in marketable careers.

Partly due to economic constraints and partly because of the growing hegemony of technoscience, it is hard to miss the implosion between universities and vocational schools that eliminate liberal arts requirements and do little more than job training and indoctrinating students with capitalist values of competition, individualism, materialism, greed, and so on. Vocational schools such as Phoenix University are themselves corporate behemoths with branches spread throughout the US like fast-food chains. Indeed, on the neoliberal-consumerist model of education, knowledge is nothing but information to be consumed as quickly as possible, a sugary pabulum as injurious to the health of the mind as Whoppers and Big Macs are to the life of the body. In a society organized around work, productivity, and maximal exploitation of labor, no one has time for a satisfying meal let alone a genuine education, and the “slow food” movement ought to be linked to a drive toward a “slow education” that allows students the time and leisure to think and mature as human beings in pursuit of autonomy rather than in the service of capital.

As corporations, universities were interested in buying materials, investing in research and projects, inventing and patenting new technologies or advances in science and medicine, and competing on the marketplace. In fact, by the 1980s and 1990s, universities and society as a whole were becoming increasingly corporatized, marketized, and globalized. Acting like capitalists committed to the tyranny of the bottom line, universities began the cut-and-slash tactics that Reagan took to social programs in the 1980s, for a profitable enterprise cannot have excess costs, and labor expenses must be minimized. The dynamic that led to the restructuring of universities along corporate lines stemmed from aggressive neoliberal policies. The laissez-faire spirit of early capitalism was revived as neoliberalism, in order to dismantle welfare states, trade barriers, environmental regulations, and anything that stood in the way of trade. Universities moved in consort with the social, political, economic, and military systems that were changing the nature of the world through an aggressive neo-imperialism policy that was part and parcel of neoliberal attempts to subjugate the entire world to corporate power and market logic, while hopefully reviving a moribund American Empire.

Following the dominant corporate model, universities initiated a “de-skilling” of labor, and replaced the skilled labor of faculty with technology.3 Compliant with the needs of businesses and an overworked labor force, and updating higher learning for the age of the Internet, universities began to offer “long-distance learning” such that students could earn a degree at home through correspondence, with “teachers” reduced to functionaries who grade quantitative exams, raising the specter of a future university system that dispenses with teachers altogether in favor of computerized grading machines.4 “Increasingly,” Ollman writes, “university life has been organized on the basis of a complex system of tests, grades, and degrees, so that people know exactly where they fit, what they deserve, what has to be done to rise another notch on the scale, and so on. Discounting—as most educators do—their negative effects on scholarship, critical thinking, and collegiality, these practices have succeeded in instilling a new discipline and respect for hierarchy.”5

As universities implemented the neoliberal model, and economic realities became more pressing, particularly in the global economic crisis of 2008, universities, like automobile industries and other businesses, continued a trend of downsizing that led to replacing tenured and full-time faculty with part-time, adjunct, and contingent instructors viewed contemptuously as an army of cheap surplus labor.6 Increasingly inadequate state funding due to fiscal crises led many to advocate for the privatization of public education institutions, a shift perfectly consistent with the neoliberal trend toward gutting social services and privatizing public institutions. Serving the political-economic-ideological conditions of capitalism in one fell swoop, universities began their attack on the system of tenure in an effort to hire less-expensive, wage- rather than salary-earning part-time instructors with few benefits and even less influence, dropping tenure positions after professors retired, and moving toward renewable three year contract systems, such as those at Florida International University.7 In fact, this is only one of over forty institutions around the country—including Florida Gulf Coast University, Evergreen State College, Bennington, Bradford, Hampshire, and the University of Texas of the Permian Basin—that hire teachers only on annual or multi-year contracts.

Downsizing and de-skilling not only saves universities salary costs and makes them more competitive (an economic benefit), it also creates a highly precarious faculty who, without job security, tend to be docile and afraid to speak out (an ideological benefit). Corporate apologists think that the tenure system is a relic from the industrial era that is outmoded in a postindustrial, neoliberal, post-Fordist, “flexible” labor economy. In this world of hyperflux, people typically have numerous careers; it is unreasonable, neoliberals argue, to expect security, stability, and permanence. By this thinking, academia ought to open itself up to this dynamic market and change its institutional patterns before the market changes it. Faculty, however, reject this argument as market fetishism and fatalism, and insist that while post-Fordism may be fine for the automobile industry, it is anathema for education, which demands the kind of system that can protect free speech, the heart of higher education. There is a direct connection between the quality of research, teaching, education, and the university system as a whole and the strength of academic freedom, tenure, and faculty governance. Academic freedom is a win-win for everyone but repressive corporations, controlling bureaucrats, and right-wing zealots.

Unfortunately, the fast capitalists are winning over academics who seek job security, and the statistics are alarming. For the last seventy years at least, there has been a clear pattern in the academic race to the bottom. As Roger Bowen notes in his mournful eulogy for the tenure institution, “Since 1940, and most particularly over the past 15 years or so, tenured positions have been on the decline, as more colleges have relied on less expensive part-time and non-tenure-track faculty members—even as those same institutions professed fidelity to the principles of academic freedom. The reason for the change is simple and brutal: To enhance their own economic security as institutions, colleges have enhanced the economic insecurity of professors by hiring more and more contingent faculty members—that is, cheap, part-time laborers who enjoy few prerogatives of the profession while suffering low pay, few (if any) benefits, and flimsy contractual rights.”8 By 2003, 43 percent of all faculty were part time teachers and a massive 65 percent of professors held non-tenure positions.9 Thus, “Today two of every three new faculty members hired across the nation are not on the tenure track, up from about 50 percent in the early 1990s.” The economic and ideological benefits are enormous to the capitalist system, and right-wing culture wars play a crucial part in drowning the embers of critical voices before they spread like a bonfire.

Notes

1.  David N. Gibbs, “Spying, Secrecy and the University: The CIA is Back on Campus,” April 7, 2003, CounterPunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/gibbs04072003.html.

2.  Henry Giroux, The University in Chains (op. cit.). Also see Nicholas Turse, “The Military-Academic Complex,” TomDispatch.com, April 29, 2004, http://www.countercurrents.org/us-turse290404.htm.

3.  On the impact of computer technologies and “deskilling” of the labor force, see Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).

4.  See David F. Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).

5.  http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/academic_freedom_content.php.

6.  On the decline of the tenure system, see Alan Finder, “Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns,” The New York Times, November 20, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/education/20adjunct.html.

7.  On the increasing use and abuse of adjunct instructors, see “Breadth of Adjunct Use and Abuse,” Inside Higher Education, December 3, 2008, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/03/adjunct. For statistics on the growth of the contingent workforce, see http://www.aftface.org/storage/face/documents/national_data_sheet.pdf. A critical response is given in Joe Berry’s book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005). For recent alarming statistics, see Audrey Williams June, “Who’s Teaching at American Colleges? Increasingly, Instructors Off the Tenure Track,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2009, http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/05/17970n.htm.

8.  Roger Bowen, “A Faustian Bargain for Academic Freedom,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2008, Volume 55, Issue 6, A36, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i06/06a03601.htm.

9.  http://www2.nea.org/he/freedom/images/WVCC06cm.ppt#284.26.ContingentFaculty.

Sad news from our friends at Five Leaves Publications in Nottingham: Colin Ward, the great British anarchist, scholar, and journalist passed away on the evening of February 11.

Ward was always attentive to the ways society already works cooperatively, and pushed us to understand these impulses and experiments as a latent potential for anarchism. Some of what passes for common-sense approaches to schooling, architecture, or social organization are themes Ward touched on in his work and has since been embedded in our popular consciousness. Many of us have been touched by Ward’s work over the years, sometimes without even realizing it.

We wish the best to Colin’s close friends, allies, and especially his partner, Harriet.

Do read Ross Bradshaw’s post about Ward at the Five Leaves Blog if you’re interested in learning more about Ward’s history, or the extended post on Next Left. For our part, we offer below just a small sampling of Colin’s thought, from his classic Anarchy in Action. You can find some of his other books available here.

**********

Anarchy and a Plausible Future

Originally published in Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1973). Excerpted in Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (Oakland: AK Press, forthcoming December 2010).

For the earlier part of my life I was quieted by being told that ours was the richest country in the world, until I woke up to know that what I meant by riches was learning and beauty, and music and art, coffee and omelettes; perhaps in the coming days of poverty we may get more of these …
–W.R. LETHABY, Form in Civilisation

This book has illustrated the arguments for anarchism, not from theories, but from actual examples of tendencies which already exist, alongside much more powerful and dominant authoritarian methods of social organisation. The important question is, therefore, not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society. Is an anarchist society possible?

We can only say, from the evidence of human history, that no kind of society is impossible. If you are powerful enough and ruthless enough you can impose almost any kind of social organisation on people – for a while. But you can only do so by methods which, however natural and appropriate they may be for any other kind of ‘ism’ – acting on the well-known principle that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, are repugnant to anarchists, unless they see themselves as yet another of those revolutionary elites ‘leading the people’ to the promised land. You can impose authority but you cannot impose freedom. An anarchist society is improbable, not because anarchy is unfeasible, or unfashionable, or unpopular, but because human society is not like that, because, as Malatesta put it in the passage quoted in the last chapter, ‘we are, in any case, only one of the forces acting in society’.

The degree of social cohesion implied in the idea of ‘an anarchist society’ could only occur in a society so embedded in the cake of custom that the idea of choice among alternative patterns of social behaviour simply did not occur to people. I cannot imagine that degree of unanimity and I would dislike it if I could, because the idea of choice is crucial to any philosophy of freedom and spontaneity. So we don’t have to worry about the boredom of utopia: we shan’t get there. But what results from this conclusion? One response would be to stress anarchism as an ideal of personal liberation, ceasing to think of changing society, except by example. Another would be to conclude that because no reads lead to utopia no road leads anywhere, an attitude which, in the end, is identical with the utopian one because it asserts that there are no partial, piecemeal, compromise of temporary solutions, only one attainable or unattainable final solution. But, as Alexander Herzen put it over a century ago: ‘A goal which is infinitely remote is not a goal at all, it is a deception. A goal must be closer – at the very least the labourer’s wage or pleasure in the work performed. Each epoch, each generation, each life has had, and had, its own experience, and the end of each generation must be itself.’

The choice between libertarian and authoritarian solutions is not a once-and-for-all cataclysmic struggle, it is a series of running engagements, most of them never concluded, which occur, and have occurred, throughout history. Every human society, except the most totalitarian of utopias or anti-utopias, is a plural society with large areas which are not in conformity with the officially imposed or declared values. An example of this can be seen in the alleged division of the world into capitalist and communist blocks: there are vast areas of capitalist societies which are not governed by capitalist principles, and there are many aspects of the socialist societies which cannot be described as socialist. You might even say that the only thing that makes life livable in the capitalist world is the unacknowledged capitalist element in it. This is why a controlled market is a left-wing demand in capitalist economy – along with state control, while a free market is a left-wing demand in a communist society – along with workers’ control. In both cases, the demands are for whittling away power from the centre, whether it is the power of the state or capitalism, or state-capitalism.

So what are the prospects for increasing the anarchist content of the real world? From one point of view the outlook is bleak: centralised power, whether that of governments or super-governments, or of private capitalism or the super-capitalism of giant international corporations, has never been greater. The prophesies of nineteenth-century anarchists like Proudhon and Bakunin about the power of the state over the citizen have a relevance today which must have seemed unlikely for their contemporaries.

From another standpoint the outlook is infinitely promising. The very growth of the state and its bureaucracy, the giant corporation and its privileged hierarchy, are exposing their vulnerability to non-co-operation, to sabotage, and to the exploitation of their weaknesses by the weak. They are also giving rise to parallel organisations, counter organisations, alternative organisations, which exemplify the anarchist method. Industrial mergers, and rationalisation have bred the revival of the demand for workers’ control, first as a slogan or a tactic like the work-in, ultimately as a destination. The development of the school and the university as broiler-houses for a place in the occupational pecking-order have given rise to the de-schooling movement and the idea of the anti-university. The use of medicine and psychiatry as agents of conformity has led to the idea of the anti-hospital and the self-help therapeutic group. The failure of Western society to house its citizens has prompted the growth of squatter movements and tenants’ co-operatives. The triumph of the supermarket in the United States has begun a mushrooming of food co-operatives. The deliberate pauperisation of those who cannot work has led to the recovery of self-respect through Claimants’ Unions.

Community organisations of every conceivable kind, community newspapers, movement for child welfare, communal households have resulted from the new consciousness that local as well as central government exploit the poor and are unresponsive to those who are unable to exert effective pressure for themselves. The ‘rationalisation’ of local administration in Britain into ‘larger and more effective units’ is evoking a response in the demand for neighbourhood councils. A new self-confidence and assertion of their right to exist on their own terms has sprung up among the victims of particular kinds of discrimination – black liberation, women’s liberation, homosexual liberation, prisoners’ liberation, children’s liberation: the list is almost endless and is certainly going to get longer as more and more people become more and more conscious that society is organised in ways which deny them a place in the sun. In the age of mass politics and mass conformity, this is a magnificent re-assertion of individual values and of human dignity.

None of these movements is yet a threat to the power structure, and this is scarcely surprising since hardly any of them existed before the late 1960s. None of them fits into the framework of conventional politics. In fact, they don’t speak the same language as the political parties. They talk the language of anarchism and they insist on anarchist principles of organisation, which they have learned not from political theory but from their own experience. They organise in loosely associated groups which are voluntary, functional, temporary and small. They depend, not on membership cards, votes, a special leadership and a herd of inactive followers but on small functional groups which ebb and flow, group and regroup, according to the task in hand. They are networks, not pyramids.

At the very time when the ‘irresistible trends of modern society’ seemed to be leading us to a mass society of enslaved consumers they are reminding us of the truth that the irresistible is simply that which is not resisted. But obviously a whole series of partial and incomplete victories, of concessions won from the holders of power, will not lead to an anarchist society. But it will widen the scope of free action and the potentiality for freedom in the society we have. But such compromises of anarchist notions would have to be made, such authoritarian bedfellows chosen, for a frontal attack on the power structure, that the anarchist answer to cries for revolutionary unity is likely to be ‘Whose noose are you inviting me to put round my neck this time?’

But in thinking about a plausible future, another factor has entered into the general consciousness since the late 1960s. So many books, so many reports, so many conferences have been devoted to it, that it is only necessary for me to state a few general propositions about it. The first is that the world’s resources are finite. The second is that the wealthy economics have been exploiting the unrenewable resources at a rate which the planet cannot sustain. The third is that these ‘developed’ economies are also exploiting the resources of the ‘Third World’ countries as cheap raw materials. This means, not only that the Third World countries can never hope to achieve the levels of consumption of the rich world, but that the rich countries themselves cannot continue to consume at the present accelerating rate. The public debate around these issues is not about the truth of the contentions, it is simply about the question: How Soon? How soon before the fossil fuels run out? How soon before the Third World rises in revolt against international exploitation?

How soon will we be facing the consequences of the non-viability of future economic growth? I leave aside the related questions about pollution and about population. But all these questions profoundly affect all our futures and the predictions we make about social change, whether we mean the changes we desire or the ones which circumstances force upon us. They also cut completely across accepted political categories, as do the policies of the ecology lobby or the environmental pressure groups in both Britain and the United States.

The growth economists, the politicians of both right and left, who envisaged an ever-expanding cycle of consumption, with the philosophy characterised by Kenneth Burke as Borrow, Spend, Buy, Waste, Want, have just not caught up with future realities. If anyone has it is that minority among the young in the affluent countries who have consciously rejected the mass consumption society – its values as well as its dearly-bought products – and adopted, not out of Puritanism but out of a different set of priorities, an earlier consumer philosophy: Eat it, up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. The editor of The Ecologist summed up the argument thus: ‘affluence for everybody is an impossible dream: the world simply does not contain sufficient resources, nor could it absorb the heat and other wasted generated by the immense amount of energy required. Indeed, the most important thing to realise, when we plan our future, is that affluence is both a local and a temporary phenomenon. Unfortunately it is the principal, if not the only, goal our industrial society gives us.’ His journal in its ‘Blueprint for Survival’ has the distinction of being among the few com-commentaries on the crisis of environment and resources to go beyond predicting the consequences of continued population growth and depletion of resources, to envisaging the kind of physical and economic structure of life which its authors regard as indispensable for a viable future, drawing up a timetable for change for the century 1975-2075, to establish in that time ‘a network of self-sufficient, self-regulating communities.’ The authors cheerfully accept the charge that their programme is unsophisticated and over-simplified, the implication being that if the reader can formulate a better alternative, or a different time-scale, he should do so. The interesting thing is that they have re-invented an older vision of the future. Back in the 1890s three men, equally unqualified as shareholders in Utopia Limited, formulated their prescriptions for the physical setting of a future society. William Morris, designer and socialist, wrote News from Nowhere; Peter Kropotkin, geographer and anarchist, wrote Fields, Factories and Workshops; and Ebenezer Howard, inventor and parliamentary shorthand writer, wrote Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Each of these blueprints for survival was more influential than its original readers could have supposed, though less than its author would have hoped. Morris’s vision was totally irrelevant for the twentieth century, but his picture of a post-industrial, decentralised, state-free Britain in the twenty-first century, certainly makes sense for the new ecologically-aware generation, while any American will recognise the force of his backward glance at the future of the United States: ‘For these lands, and, I say, especially the northern parts of America, suffered so terribly from the full force of the last days of civilisation, and became such horrible places to live in, that one may say that for nearly a hundred years the people of the northern parts of American have been engaged in gradually making a dwelling-place out of a stinking dust-heap…’

Howard’s legacy is of course the new towns: his immediate purpose was to mobilise voluntary initiative for the building of one demonstration model, confident that its advantages would set in motion a large-scale adoption of the idea of urban dispersal in ‘social cities’, or what the TCPA calls ‘a many-centred nexus of urban communities’. Lewis Mumford notes that ‘By now, our neotechnic and biotechnic facilities have at last caught up with Howard’s and Kropotkin’s intuitions. Howard’s plan for canalising the flow of population, diverting it from the existing centres to new centres; his plan for decentralising industry and setting up both city and industry within a rural matrix, the whole planned to a human scale, is technologically far more feasible today than it was…

Kropotkin’s own vision of the future, with industry decentralised, and the competition for markets replaced by local production and consumption while people themselves alternate brain work and manual work, is being realised in a political climate he hardly foresaw, in China, but is equally in harmony with the programme of the ‘Blueprint for Survival’:

The scattering of industries over the country – so as to bring the factory amidst the fields, to make agriculture derive all those profits which it always finds in being combined with industry and to produce a combination of industrial with agricultural work – is surely the next step to be taken … This step is imposed by the necessity for each healthy man and woman to spend a part of their lives in manual work in the free air; and it will be rendered the more necessary when the great social movements, which have now become unavoidable, come to disturb the present international trade, and compel each nation to revert to her own resources for her own maintenance.

The authors of the ‘Blueprint’, having set out their analysis of the crisis of population, resources and environment, sketch out what they see as a necessary and desirable future for the human habitat. They argue for decentralisation on several grounds. Their first reason is that it would ‘promote the social conditions in which public opinion and full public participation in decision-making become as far as possible the means whereby communities are ordered’. Their second reason is that, on ecological grounds, they foresee a return to diversified farming instead of prairie-type crop-growing or factory-type livestock rearing, with production for a local market and the return of domestic sewage to the land, in the setting of ‘a decentralised society of small communities where industries are small enough to be responsive that ‘the decreasing autonomy of communities and local regions, and the increasing centralisation of decision-making and authority in the cumbersome bureaucracies of the state, have been accompanied by the rise of self-conscious individualism, an individualism that feels threatened unless it is harped upon’.

They see the accumulation of material goods as the accompaniment of this self-conscious individualism(what others would call ‘privatisation’) and believe that the rewards of significant relationships and mutual responsibilities in a small community will provide ample compensation for the decreasing emphasis on consumption which will be essential for the conversation of resources and the minimisation of pollution. Their final reason is that ‘to deploy a population in small towns and villages is to reduce to the minimum its impact on the environment. This is because the actual urban superstructure required per inhabitant goes up radically as the size of the town increases beyond a certain point.’ Affirming that they are not proposing inward-looking, self-obsessed, or closed communities, but in fact want ‘an efficient and sensitive communications network between all communities’, they conclude with the splendid declaration:

‘We emphasise that our goal should be to create community feeling and global awareness, rather than that dangerous and sterile compromise which is nationalism.’

But will it ever happen? Will this humane and essentially anarchistice vision of a workable future simply join all the other anarchical utopias of the past? Years ago George Orwell remarked:

If one considers the probabilities one is driven to the conclusion that anarchism implies a low standard of living. It need not imply a hungry or uncomfortable world, but it rules out the kind of air-conditioned, chromium-plated, gadget-ridden existence which is now considered desirable and enlightened. The processes involved in making, say, an aeroplane are so complex as to be only possible in a planned, centralised society, with all the repressive apparatus that that implies. Unless there is some unpredictable change in human nature, liberty and efficiency must pull in opposite directions.

This, from Orwell’s point of view (he was not a lover of luxury) is not in itself a criticism of anarchism, and he is certainly right in thinking that an anarchist society would never build Concorde or land men on the moon. But were either of these technological triumphs efficient in terms of the resources poured into them and the results for the ordinary inhabitant of this planet? Size and resources are to the technologist what power is to the politician: he can never have too much of them. A different kind of society, with different priorities, would evolve a different technology: its bases already exist and in terms of the tasks to be performed it would be far more ‘efficient’ than either Western capitalism of Soviet state-capitalism. Not only technology but also economics would have to be redefined. As Kropotkin envisaged it: ‘Political economy tends more and more to become a science devoted to the study of the needs of men and of the means of satisfying them with the least possible waste of energy, - it is, a sort of physiology of society.’

But it is not in the least likely that states and governments, in either the rich or the poor worlds will, of their own volition, embark on the drastic change of direction which a consideration of our probably future demands. Necessity may reduce the rate of resource-consumption but the powerful and privileged will hang on to their share – both within nations and between nations. Power and privilege have never been known to abdicate. This is why anarchism is bound to be a call to revolution. But what kind of revolution? Nothing has been said in this book about the two great irrelevancies of discussion about anarchism: the false antitheses between violence and nonviolence and between revolution and reform. The most violent institution in our society is the state and its reacts violently to efforts to take away its power. (‘As Malatesta used to say, you try to do your thing and they intervene, and then you are to blame for the fight that happens.’ Does this mean that the effort should not be made? A distinction has to be made between the violence of the oppressor and the resistance of the oppressed.

Similarly, there is a distinction not between revolution and reform but on the one hand between the kind of revolution which installs a different gang of rulers or the kind of reform which makes oppression more palatable or more efficient, and on the other those social changes, whether revolutionary or reformist, through which people enlarge their autonomy and reduce their subjection to external authority.

Anarchism in all its guises is an assertion of human dignity and responsibility. It is not a programme for political change but an act of social self-determination.

Theodore Hamm of The Brooklyn Rail recently interviewed Matt Hern about his excellent new book, Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future. We repost the piece here with the kind permission of The Brooklyn Rail.

Learning from Vancouver: Matt Hern, in conversation with Theodore Hamm

In his new book Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future (AK Press, 2010), radical urbanist Matt Hern critiques his home city of Vancouver, paying particular attention to the contradictions in how the city presents itself to the world.

What do you mean by “liquid city”? How do Vancouver and some of the other cities you compare it to–New York, Istanbul, Montreal, et al.–fit that designation?

Part of it is me being metaphorically cute, referring sort of obliquely to the omnipresence in Vancouver of water via the rain, drizzle, fog, ocean, rivers and streams. Mostly I am talking about the pervasively liquid quality of the world in a neo-liberal time of globalization with people, goods, capital, and investment sloshing around the globe virtually unfettered. Globalization has been around forever, and I am most certainly in favour of migration of people and ideas, but this rendition is driven by incredible corporatization. It’s creating a world of faceless, placeless “sites” that are totally replaceable and look more and more alike. I am arguing for everyday people to learn to really inhabit cities, to reverse enclosure, and to create public and even better common places that can be commonly understood, controlled and governed.

You pay particular attention to how cities incorporate their past into the present, and argue that Vancouver needs to “root its future in historical honesty.” Can you explain?

Every city is built on slaughter. But it is especially critical for young, naïve cities like Vancouver to honestly come to grips with who was living here before the city arrived and what that relationship has entailed. In our case, the attempt to erase the Coast Salish people, to relegate them to history has left us in a state of dishonesty, of willful mis-remembering. Stanley Park, right in the heart of the city and the “crown jewel” of the city’s touristic outreach, was once home to four native settlements. Coming to grips with that, and understanding who we stand beside, will help us significantly in building a decent city.

Vancouver will be in the international spotlight for the month of February. How will it showcase itself? What will the world not see?

The world will see a clean, green, manicured, managed and choreographed city in a spectacular setting. What it won’t be offering up is much evidence of a genuine housing crisis, that the Downtown Eastside is a shocking slum in the midst of an exuberantly rich city. We won’t learn that the city has the lowest minimum wage in Canada as well as the highest rates of child poverty in the country. And the global media most definitely won’t be highlighting the really significant resistance during the Games—the 16,000 cops on the street, the $1 billion security budget, and the scores of security and military agencies from all over the world will see to that.

After the Olympics, Vancouver will likely become an even more popular tourist destination and a site for the elite to have second homes, etc. Are you fearful that areas like East Vancouver, which you write so favorably about, will be swallowed up?

I am afraid that the gentrification that is hollowing out the city will continue to gobble what is left of the living, funky and vibrant parts of East Van. But the likelihood is that the city will experience a (possibly severe) economic downturn. Already we’re seeing the negative effects of the ridiculous spending spree the Olympics prompted – amateur and high school sports funding is getting slashed, the BC Arts Council budget has been slashed by a stunning 96%, and libraries, community centres and the parks board have all taken huge hits. And that all happened before the Olympics started. After the circus leaves we are all anticipating much worse. But in many ways I think it will open up a real space to reimagine the city. Amid the rubble the Olympics will leave behind, we have every opportunity to see that a better city is possible. Despite it all, I have a ton of hope, not just for Vancouver, but cities in general.

Hi folks,

We are happy to announce that there’s three new AK Press books at the printer right now. We sent them all off over the last few days and they will be trickling in in mid-March. So all those lucky Friends of AK subscribers will hit paydirt when their April shipment arrives.

First up is We Are an Image From the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008. It’s edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and the Void Network. Here’s what we say about it:

What causes a city, then a whole country, to explode? How did one neighborhood’s outrage over the tragic death of one teenager transform itself into a generalized insurrection against State and capital, paralyzing an entire nation for a month?

This is a book about the murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, killed by the police in the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens on December 6th, 2008, and of the revolution in the streets that followed, bringing business as usual in Greece to a screeching, burning halt for three marvelous weeks, and putting the fear of history back into the bureaucrats of Fortress Europe and beyond.

We Are an Image From the Future delves into the December insurrection and its aftermath through interviews with those who witnessed and participated in it, alongside the communiqués and texts that circulated through the networks of revolt. It provides the on-the-ground facts needed to understand these historic events, and also dispels the myths activists outside of Greece have constructed around them. What emerges is not just the intensity of the riots, but the stories of organizing and solidarity, the questions of strategy and tactics: a desperately needed examination of the fabric of the Greek movements that made December possible.

“If protest is when I say I disagree and resistance is when I do something about it, then insurrection is when everyone else is on-board too. So it was in December of 2008, when Greece burned. Behind the spectacular street uprising is years of organizing and a deeply embedded anti-authoritarian culture of emancipation. We Are an Image from the Future is a quintessential portrait of revolution in action. The coming global insurrection has already begun.”—Ramor Ryan, author of Clandestines—The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile.

“What the Zapatista uprising of 1994 was to the antiglobalization movement, the Greek uprising of 2008 could be to the demise of capitalism itself.”—CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective

“This book is just what Dr. Fucking Anarchy ordered. How to turn insurrection into revolution. The Greek revolt will inspire a generation as Paris ‘68 did 40 years earlier.”—Ian Bone, class warrior and author of Bash the Rich

“This dazzling collection is not a book about the great insurrection of 2008—it is a living piece of it that can become a part of us, and through us, it opens the prospect of a universe we might never otherwise have imagined possible. Future historians may well conclude that the Revolution finally began in 2008. If they do, this book will have played a crucial role in that realization.”—David Graeber, author of Direct Action: An Ethnography

Cover design by Kate Khatib:

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Next is the first book in the AK Press / Institute for Anarchist Studies “Anarchist Interventions Series,” Anarchism and its Aspirations, by Cindy Milstein.

From nineteenth-century newspaper publishers to the participants in the “Battle of Seattle” and the recent Greek uprising, anarchists have been inspired by the ideal of a free society of free individuals—a world without hierarchy or domination. But what exactly would that look like, and how can we get there? Anarchism and Its Aspirations provides an accessible overview of an often-misunderstood political philosophy, highlighting its principles and practices as well as its reconstructive vision of a liberatory society.

“A brilliant primer of anarchist politics.” —Matt Hern, author of Common Ground in a Liquid City
“I expect Anarchism and Its Aspirations to become the introduction to anarchism of the next decade.” —Gabriel Kuhn, editor of Gustav Landauer’s Revolution and Other Writings
“A road map to the many social and cultural movements that anarchism has traversed . . . a testimony to its continuing ability to capture the radical imagination.” —Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch
“Uncompromising, practical, and hopeful, this book is essential reading for all who are taking on climate change, war, or corporate capitalism.” —David Solnit, coauthor of The Battle of the Story of the “Battle of Seattle”

Cover design by Josh MacPhee:

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And finally, formerly available as a $200 hardcover (under the name Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona)—but worth every penny—is our reasonably priced Anarchism and the City by Chris Ealham. This one is published by AK Press in conjunction with The Cañada Blanch Center for Contemporary Spanish Studies and includes a prologue by Paul Preston. Here’s what we’re saying:

“A magnificent, revelatory history of a city of slums and a proletariat of hope. The best book that I’ve read in the last decade.”―Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, Planet of Slums, and Buda’s Wagon

Between 1898 and 1937, competing interests from the national government, the regional industrialists, and the working class, fought for control of Barcelona. The social realities of Barcelona―as Spain’s economic, cultural, social, and political capital―provided a perfect backdrop for battle over the urban future. Chris Ealham explores these complex and often violent relationships, utilizing an innovative blend of history, urbanism, sociology, and cultural studies. No other work digs this deep into the composition of an urban working class movement―and certainly not with such a sympathetic eye for the aspirations of its anarchist denizens.

“Scrupulously researched and well written, this is the finest study of working-class anarchist life and culture since Paul Avrich’s The Haymarket Tragedy. Not only a study of working-class Barcelona, Anarchism and the City is the story of anarchists organizing themselves where they lived, and of the militant culture they were a part of and helped to create. Ealham’s book draws on a marvelous array of sources, and offers a picture of anarchism in Spain that is both groundbreaking, honest, and, yes, inspirational. This is the history of the barris coming alive in your hands. Put simply, no future study of anarchism can ever ignore this book, which comes closer than any other English-language work in understanding what anarchism and its practice meant to Spanish working-class people at the time.”―Barry Pateman, Associate Editor at the Emma Goldman Papers and editor of Chomsky on Anarchism

Cover design by John Yates:

First of all, you know the drill…another month, another awesome package deal from AK. This month, in honor of the resistance to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, we have put together a special one for you. This “snack pack” is basically a buy-two-get-one-free deal (you get about $60 worth of stuff for $39.95, and the low shipping cost of a single item—what a bargain!). But besides being an unsurpassed value, it’s also a wealth of really important and timely information!

“Eat Shit, Olympics!” Snack Pack

This month, all eyes will be on Vancouver as that most sinister corporate circus—the 2010 Winter Olympics—descends on the city. What’s wrong with the Olympics, you ask? Well, start with a history of colonialism and the fact that British Columbia remains largely unceded and non-surrendered Indigenous territory. Add the destruction of the environment, massive security operations and invasion of civil liberties, homelessness and criminalization of poverty, huge corporations raking in profits at the expense of the public, union-busting…the list goes on. But say you can’t make it up to join the protests, what will you do instead of being glued to the TV? AK Press has the solution! This month’s special package deal, or “Snack Pack,” is both timely AND cheap! Our ever-so-daintily-named “Eat Shit, Olympics!” Snack Pack includes the following three items (for the price of two, and the low shipping cost of a single book):

Titles included in the package (you can also order them individually, of course) are:

Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, by Christopher Shaw
This book details the history of how Vancouver won the bid for the 2010 Games, who was involved, and what the real motives were. It also describes the role of corporate media in promoting the Games, the machinations of government and business, and the opposition that has emerged.

Five Ring Circus: The Untold Story of the Vancouver 2010 Games (DVD), directed by Conrad Schmidt
A documentary film that exposes a side of the Vancouver Olympics that has not been revealed before. Find out what mayors, activists, and residents think of the 2010 Olympic games, and see how commitments to environmental, social and economic sustainability have not been honored.

Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future, by Matt Hern
This new book (published by AK Press!) examines city living, and possibilities for an urban future—looking at cities worldwide but using the author’s home city of Vancouver as a foil. Explore what it is that makes Vancouver and other cities truly livable and sustainable (hint: the answer is NOT an international mega-corporate invasion of your city).

Our comrades from the Friendly Fire Collective are going up to Vancouver and will be writing about the Olympic resistance activities going on there. You can check out their website for daily updates.

Now we’ll leave you with a very special video to get you into the true Olympic spirit:

As most of you know, the fight to halt mountaintop removal in Appalachia is an ongoing campaign. Just two weeks ago, Climate Ground Zero rallied forces together for a tree-sit on Coal River Mountain in southern West Virginia, and independent journalist (and forthcoming AK Press author) Tricia Shapiro was there to help document the action, and spread the word. We asked Tricia, whose book on MTR resistance in Appalachia will be published by AK Press this fall, to write a report on the action for Revolution by the Book. Please feel free to repost & republish, but please contact publicity@akpress.org to let us know. We’ll be asking Tricia for regular updates on the situation in West Virginia over the coming months; if your journal or newspaper is interested in on-the-ground coverage of the CGZ actions, and other MTR-resistance fights in Appalachia, please contact us. You can also find a wealth of information on the Climate Ground Zero website.

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Before dawn on Thursday, Jan. 21, a dozen heavily laden activists headed for the edge of a strip mine site on Coal River Mountain, in southern West Virginia. The hikers approached three trees, oak and poplar, previously selected by scouts as suitable in several ways: The trees were not far apart, about 50 or 60 feet between them. Each tree was suitable for installing a person on a platform high enough up to make removal difficult. They were in undeveloped terrain where it would be hard for mine workers to bring in heavy equipment. And they were close enough to mining activities to prevent blasting if the trees were occupied.

Working quickly, the three prospective tree sitters and their supporters hoisted plywood platforms, tarps, food, water, radios, batteries, and other essentials up into the trees. Finally, the sitters—Eric Blevins, Amber Nitchman, David Aaron Smith (also known as Planet)—settled on their platforms and pulled up their ropes.

Setting up traverse lines—ropes that would enable the sitters to move themselves and their supplies from one tree to another—was about the only thing that did not go as intended. Too many branches were in the way for lines to be set between the trees, especially in the dark, so they would have to do without. The sitters had planned to share certain supplies: They had only two cellphones and one battery-to-phone charger between them, for example. If one sitter came down early, he or she wouldn’t be able to pass unused supplies to the others. Still, each of the sitters had at least a communications radio, spare batteries, and enough food and water for a week or more. Eric, who had the cellphone charger, would be the primary contact with the outside world. Amber would minimize use of her cellphone, and the three of them would communicate as needed by radio. They would make do.

Two supporters remained on the ground by the trees. Several others would hide in the woods, too far away to see the sitters but close enough for radio contact: If the sitters said they were in danger, these off-site supporters would run to their aid. Others who helped set up the sit left and began a long hike back toward base camp, several miles away, at the headquarters for Climate Ground Zero (CGZ).

(Slideshow from the Climate Ground Zero website. Many, many more images, press releases, etc. there …)

CGZ supports the use of nonviolent civil disobedience by activists seeking to end mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining and similar sorts of large-scale strip mining in Appalachia. In 2009, anti-MTR activists affiliated with the CGZ and Mountain Justice campaigns launched 18 civil-disobedience actions in West Virginia’s coalfields, incurring more than 130 arrests. Some of those actions, like this tree sit, were on mine sites; others took place at the front gates of mine facilities or in the offices of government officials. Most took place in or near the Coal River valley, and many focused on Coal River Mountain.

Coal River Mountain is the last intact mountain bordering the valley, with thousands of acres of continuous forest and healthy streams. It has excellent potential for a large-scale wind farm that would produce more jobs and higher local earnings and tax revenues than would strip-mining the site. In addition, a wind farm would leave nearly all of the mountain’s forest intact, allowing local people to continue to hunt and forage there, as they have done for generations. All those benefits could be sustained as long as the wind blows. MTR operations would end on the mountain in 15 years or so, leaving a flattened, treeless landscape with much-reduced wind potential and insufficient stability for installing large turbines.

Massey Energy, whose subsidiaries run most of the strip mines near Coal River valley, has long planned to strip-mine some 6,600 acres of this mountain, divided into four contiguous permit areas with a total of 18 proposed “valley fills,” where miners would dump rubble from mining nearby. Massey has not yet obtained permits for any of those valley fills. Instead, Massey’s subsidiary Marfork has permission to dump rubble from the Bee Tree permit area around the edge of the adjacent Brushy Fork sludge pond.

Such mining at the Bee Tree site would require blasting quite close to the huge pond, first for building a haul road then for the mining itself. The pond covers hundreds of acres, is held back by an earthen dam 900 feet high, is permitted to hold up to 9 billion of gallons of sludge (liquid waste from processing coal), and is located above a honeycomb of old underground mines. Blasting nearby thus runs the risk of causing a catastrophic flood by cracking the pond’s floor. That is exactly what happened a decade ago at another Massey site, in Inez, KY, where more than 300 million gallons of sludge spilled into tributaries of the Ohio River—30 times more waste than the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But Brushy Fork is a much bigger pond than the one at Inez, and its failure could result in a much bigger catastrophe: Massey’s own disaster contingency plan, required of it after the Inez spill, supposes a wall of sludge 40 feet high moving down the Coal River valley, mile after mile after mile.

Blasting for construction of a haul road at Bee Tree had begun several weeks before the tree sit went up. As long as the sitters remained in their trees near the blast site, further blasting would be halted. “Our trees were right near where they were blasting,” Eric later recalled. “We could see blast holes from our trees, really close to us, and we could see the [Brushy Fork] impoundment just a few hundred feet away.”

During the morning of the first day of the tree sit, the two on-site ground supporters were arrested and taken away. Massey workers felled several saplings near the sitters’ trees, but Eric, in a phone call to base camp, confirmed that the sitters felt safe.

That afternoon, workers set up bright lights and an extremely loud array of noisemaking machinery, including both airhorns and pulsing sirens similar to those on emergency vehicles. Fortunately, Eric and Planet had earplugs. Unfortunately, Amber’s had been left out of her pack. (She plugged her ears with toilet paper.) Even more unfortunately, the noise was so loud that earplugs were only partly effective: They “kind of knocked the bass out,” Planet later recalled, “but the high-pitched sounds were coming through clear as a bell.”

Friday morning, amid the continuing noise, workers began erecting a 10-foot chain-link fence around the trees, apparently to deter any attempt to resupply the sitters. On Saturday, the chilly mist-and-rain that had fallen since the tree sit began stopped, allowing the sitters a welcome opportunity to dry out a bit.

Meanwhile, a plan was being hatched by off-site supporters: One person who’d been hiding in the woods within radio range of the sitters would creep up during the night to get a good look at the fence, the noisemakers, and the security set-up, then come out of the woods to brief supporters at base camp. One or two of those supporters would attempt to resupply the sitters and would presumably be arrested, but others would remain in the woods nearby, listening to the sitters on radio. Whoever made the resupply effort might also try to get a decibel-meter reading of the noise near the trees before passing the meter on to one of the sitters in a resupply pack. Those packs would also include better ear protection as well as items (such as batteries) intended to make up for the sitter’s inability to pass supplies from one tree to another.

The reconnaissance mission went smoothly, and the person who did it briefed folks at base camp on Sunday: The chain-link fence around the trees was completed, except for a gap of maybe 20 feet along the side of it nearest to the mine site’s haul road. Security guards had attached a tarp to the fence, to give themselves some shelter from the rain. The fence was close enough to the trees that the resupply scenario being planned seemed plausible, though far from certain to succeed.

The most disturbing information brought out of the woods that day concerned the noise-makers. In addition to the sirens, there were three separate airhorn rigs: As many as four of the kind of very loud airhorns used on big trucks were ganged together and hoisted up beneath each tree-sit platform, where they blasted away continuously.

“We were able to handle it OK,” Eric later said, “but it was a really cruel and unusual way to attack somebody who’s doing something nonviolent. [It] was just uncalled for, when our actions were completely nonviolent and in defense of the community of people living below and the mountain … and water supply being destroyed by the mining.”

It was obvious that exposure to this kind of noise could cause permanent hearing loss. Supporters at base camp got busy with legal research, seeking grounds to compel Massey to stop the noise. That afternoon, they advised Eric to call the police to file a formal complaint. Shortly thereafter, the noise stopped–but only for a few hours.

The following morning, Monday, Jan. 25, Planet came down from his tree. Rain had resumed, and wind had blown open his tarp so that his sleeping bag got soaked and he could no longer keep himself warm.

Workers turned off the noisemakers when police arrived to arrest him, but the noise resumed after the police left. Eric and Amber remained in their trees, and CGZ stepped up its efforts to stop the noise. At CGZ’s request, hundreds of people called the Marfork subsidiary’s headquarters, Massey’s headquarters, and WV Gov. Joe Manchin’s office to demand that the noise be stopped.

On Tuesday morning, a CGZ activist was arrested while attempting to resupply the tree sitters. On Wednesday, another person attempting resupply was arrested. No resupply packs reached either of the remaining sitters.

Still, Eric and Amber had enough supplies to last for yet a while, and remained in good spirits. Eric was amazed by “how much the trees were swaying, because it was so windy up there most of the time–which just goes to show it would make a lot more sense to put windmills on the mountain, rather than to destroy the mountain for the coal.”

That Wednesday afternoon, Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward blogged that Gov. Manchin was planning to meet with a county prosecutor and state police about the noise. Around 5 PM, the noisemakers were turned off. The next morning, following a meeting with CGZ activists at his office, Manchin declared a “moratorium” on the noise pending determination of its legality and health effects.

By this time, Eric and Amber had been up in their trees for eight days—longer than any previous CGZ action. The weather for much of that time had been unpleasant, but not nearly so bad as the noise. Now, with the noise turned off, the weather was poised to take a turn for the worse: Snow was forecast, half a foot or more, followed by single-digit temperatures over the weekend.

On Friday, Jan. 29, Eric and Amber came down from their trees and were immediately arrested. Their sit was over, but the campaign to end MTR was set to continue unabated. “It’s not over until the blasting is stopped,” Amber said shortly before leaving her tree—not stopped just for nine days, but permanently.

“This is a large movement that we’re a part of,” Eric later added. “People are trying to do legislative work, and provide economic alternatives, and do all kinds of stuff to get us away from the destruction that the economy of this area has become so dependent on. Hopefully with all our combined efforts we can put a stop to this as soon as possible.”

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Tricia Shapiro has been covering anti-MTR activism as an embedded freelance writer since 2005. Her book about efforts to end mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia will be published by AK Press this fall.

Novedad editorial

Durruti “el héroe del Pueblo”. 1896-1936
Autor: El Seta

“En forma de collage se recogen citas, textos, canciones, fotos, carteles…en torno a la figura del anarquista leonés, dotando a la obra de una gran frescura y dinamismo sin perder por ello en rigor histórico”.

21 x 30 cms., 103 páginas, color
Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, 2010ISBN: 978-84-86864-77-4

Presentación:

Durruti “el héroe del pueblo” pretende ser un folletín ilustrado del pensamiento político, tomando su vida como hilo conductor, del anarquista español más universal, Buenaventura Durruti, siguiendo la estructura y gran parte de los textos de la biografía novelada “El corto verano de la anarquía. Vida y muerte de Durruti” de Hans Magnus Enzensberger, así como los textos del libro de Abel Paz “Durruti en la Revolución española“.

Todos los textos que van numerados son citas literales de las palabras pronunciadas por los protagonistas, ajustados a la imagen correspondiente en la mayoría de los casos o pronunciadas por los mismos en circunstancias parecidas. Se encuentran relacionadas, indicando su procedencia, al final de la historia, así como una sucinta reseña de los protagonistas de las mismas.

Al final se recogen diversos documentos en varios anexos.

La vida de Buenaventura, la vida del rebelde, del sindicalista, del revolucionario, del hombre de acción, es paradigma y espejo al mismo tiempo de la de numerosos anarcosindicalistas españoles del primer tercio del siglo XX y sigue siendo en los albores del nuevo milenio una antorcha que ilumina a todos los que luchan por un mundo más justo y más humano. Utopía, ¿quizás?.

Salud y Anarquía.

El Seta, León 2010.

Hello AK Bloggers! How you livin’ out there? Hope everyone is doing well. Below are some books to help you make it through this month without going mad, killing your neighbor, giving away your cat, or smashing into a cop car. To all my fellow Aquariuses out there, Happy Birthdays!

1. The Screwball Asses — It took me about two hours to receive this into our AK stock just because I couldn’t stop reading it. Alongside Violence of Financial Capitalism and The German Issue Semiotext(e) has re-upped AK with some juicy goodies.

2. Original Pluming: Trans Male Quarterly ! — This deserves an exclamation point and all you need to do is order it to find out why. From the transformative and trailblazing minds of Amos Mac and Hip Hop artist Katastrophe’s comes the first trans male magazine. Inside are helpful tips, supportive narratives, sexy photos ops, and great resources. The first issue is sold out so you better get your hands on the second very quickly.

3. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia — This book redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” Check it out!

4. Macho Sluts — You could buy this book just for the cover and you would get your money’s worth. Fortunately, the collection of stories centered around San Francisco’s dyke bathhouses, sex parties, and S/M gay bars will assure you a good night’s rest as well. Best bedtime stories ever! The 1st edition survived a brutal bashing on behalf of the mainstream lesbian press in 1988. You better get the 2nd edition before Pat Robertson hears of this!

5. Please Feed Me: A Punk Vegan Cookbook — I’m not vegan but exotic spiced fruit salad + violent phobia pizza + photos of early, late, and middle-aged punk bands = very full and satisfied macio. Wait, how the hell do you make shepherds pie vegan…

6. Heather Has Two Mommies — Check it, I’m not looking to have any kids in the near future. My collective budget couldn’t sustain a child. However, I am in support of peddling some literature that will help counter all the heteronormative ideas of family. This beautifully illustrated children’s book will aid a liberated education of a child whose mind is bombarded with homophobic trash on a daily basis…and the moms are hot.

7. To Die For The People — This new release of a classic collection of Huey P. Newton’s writings and speeches traces the development of Newton’s personal and political thinking, as well as the radical changes that took place in the formative years of the Black Panther Party. Includes a new forward by Elaine Brown and edited by Toni Morrison!

8. How To Make Soap: Without Burning Your Face Off — This is a new pamphlet from Raleigh Briggs the author of Make Your Place. Here, she teaches us how to create silky handmade soaps at home with basic directions, recipes, a list of resources, and assorted tips.

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My last two top ten are not technically “new” but we just received some fresh stock from Kersplebedeb and the information is as relevant and useful as their debuts:

9. Jailbreak Our of History: The Re-Biography of Harriet Tubman — Ninety pages of crucial revisionist history, firmly re-rooting Harriet Tubman in the context of patriarchy, race, class, and armed struggle.

10. Take Back Your Life: A Wimmin’s Guide To Alternative Health Care — Originally published by the Profane Existence anarcho-punk collective, this is an excellent practical DIY Guide—from healing common infections of the vagina and bladder to menstruation, birth control, and an understanding of AIDS.

For all of you in the Portland area over the next six weeks, make sure to stop by and see Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald’s Signs of Change show. And for those lonely souls in Portland looking forward to an evening with Facebook, get out of the house and head down to the opening tonight at 6:30.

And of course if you’re not in PDX you can always look forward to Josh and Dara’s full-color book version of the show coming out later this year courtesy of AK Press and Exit Art.

Feldman Gallery + Project Space Hosts West Coast Premiere of Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now

Exhibition | Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now
February 4 – March 19, 2010

First Thursday Opening | Thursday, February 4, 6:30 p.m.
PNCA Main Campus Building, Feldman Gallery + Project Space, 1241 N.W. Johnson St.

PNCA hosts the West Coast premiere of Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now, featuring hundreds of posters, photographs, moving images, audio clips, and ephemera that bring to life over 40 years of activism, political protest, and campaigns for social justice. Curated by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee as part of Exit Art’s Curatorial Incubator, this important and timely exhibition surveys the creative work of dozens of international social movements.

Organized thematically, the exhibition presents the creative outpourings of social movements, such as those for Civil Rights and Black Power in the United States; democracy in China; anti-apartheid in Africa; squatting in Europe; environmental activism and women’s rights internationally; and the global AIDS crisis, as well as uprisings and protests, such as those for indigenous control of lands; against airport construction in Japan; and student and worker revolution in France. The exhibition also explores the development of powerful counter-cultures that evolve beyond traditional politics and create distinct aesthetics, life-styles, and social organization.

Although histories of political groups and counter-cultures have been written, and political and activist shows have been held, this exhibition is a groundbreaking attempt to chronicle the artistic and cultural production of these movements. Signs of Change offers a chance to see relatively unknown or rarely seen works, and is intended to not only provide a historical framework for contemporary activism, but also to serve as an inspiration for the present and the future.

Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now is an exhibition produced by Exit Art, NY, and was the inaugural project of its Curatorial Incubator Program. The program expands Exit Art’s commitment to young and emerging curators and scholars in contemporary art, by giving material, financial, and human resources to developing curatorial talent. Working with Exit Art directors and staff, fellows curate large-scale exhibition projects, learn fundraising, develop outreach and educational programs, and co-publish a catalogue. Signs of Change was presented at Exit Art in 2008 and traveled to the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and the Arts Center of the Capital Region (co-presented with the Department of the Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY).
In conjunction with Signs of Change, PNCA presents a selection of video screenings, focusing on women’s activist movements. Screenings are co-presented and hosted by In Other Words Women’s Books and Resources, 8 N.E. Killingsworth St., Portland, Oregon.

Signs of Change Video Screenings

Tuesday, February 16, 7 p.m.
Stronger Than Before

This film documents the militant actions and creative activities of the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice in Seneca, New York in 1983. Although the Boston Women’s Video Collective was formed specifically to document this encampment, they continued producing video projects after it closed. (1983, 27:00 minutes, the Boston Women’s Video Collective, courtesy of the Boston Women’s Video Collective)

Uku Hamba ‘Ze/To Walk Naked

After an exhausting fight to procure housing, a group of women in Soweto, South Africa built a settlement of makeshift shacks. When police tried to evict them with bulldozers and dogs, the women defiantly stripped naked in a peaceful protest against the destruction of their homes. This unconventional action gained massive media attention and caught the attention of filmmakers who documented the struggle in “Uku Hamba ‘Ze / To Walk Naked.” (1995, 12:00 minutes, Jaqueline Maingard, Sheila Meintjes and Heather Thompson, courtesy of Third World Newsreel)

Tuesday, February 23, 7 p.m.
Carry Greenham Home

“Carry Greenham Home” is an on-the-ground look at the activities of the Greenham Common Women’s Encampment. The film focuses not just on the women’s anti-nuclear and anti-military actions, but also on the feminist practices on which their lives were based. (1984, 66:00 minutes, Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, courtesy of Women Make Movies)

For your reading pleasure: a joint reportback from the two AK collective members who went down to the Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair last weekend.

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Macio: Last Sunday, January 24th, AK Press attended the 2nd Annual Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair. Suzanne and I were the collective members tasked with hauling the books and ourselves down to L.A. for the weekend.

Suzanne: I was happy to be able to attend again, as I’d had the pleasure of going down to the first L.A. Anarchist Bookfair last year and been super impressed with the way the organizers had pulled things together. I was actually so excited to go that I volunteered to split the driving duties with Macio (and I hate driving).

Macio: The bookfair was held at Barnsdall Art Park in North Hollywood. Other vendors and comrades who were present included Critical Resistance (L.A), Earth First! Journal, South Central Farmers, Modesto Anarcho, Skylight Books, L.A. Anarchist Black Cross Federation, and lots more.

Suzanne: This space was amazing—much more spacious than last year’s bookfair—and it was pretty packed the whole time. Besides the folks Macio mentioned, I was also glad to see folks from Semiotext(e), Taala Hooghan Infoshop in Flagstaff, and Revolutionary Autonomous Communities (RAC)—plus there was a good crowd of folks down from the Bay Area including the Friendly Fire Collective (our tabling neighbors and also sort of my actual neighbors!), UA in the Bay, PM Press, and lots of other familiar faces.

Macio: The event was opened up by traditional Aztec dancers and drummers. What followed was an exciting day of selling books. The AK table was packed pretty consistently with curious minds. Luckily the water fountain was located nearby so Suzanne could take frequent sips for hydration. I, on the other hand, found my calm on the balcony where the children’s day care area was set up. From what we could tell the organizers of the bookfair did a great job of scheduling engaging workshops and author panels. AK was not able to attend any of the activities but the schedule listed workshops on Indigenous Resistance, Anarchist Urban Planning Theory, Student Occupations, Bike Kitchen Mobile, and Political Prisoners, to name a few. There were also short films showing throughout the day. Although we weren’t able to check out any workshops, we definitely took advantage of all the wonderful food being offered. In addition to Food Not Bombs there were a few other independent vendors providing food and drink for a small price. One particular vendor served delicious vegan tacos and nachos with a homemade “cheese” sauce. So Good! And I scored some great t-shirts from Mass Media Distro.

Suzanne: The great thing about working at events like this is getting to talk to so many folks who come up to our table looking for particular books (odds are, we’ve got em!), or looking for recommendations, or just being generally curious about anarchism or some aspect of radical politics or AK Press itself. The one unfortunate thing is that this all keeps us so busy that, unless we can figure out how to clone ourselves (we haven’t yet), we will always have a hard time getting away from the tables long enough to check out the other stuff that’s going on. But it did look like there was some really great talks and panels lined up. (Oh, and Macio is right, the food was delicious.) The other highlight was that Macio’s mom came and hung out at the table with us.

Macio: The bookfair started at 11am and went on until 8 or so. We were pretty much selling through our stock the whole time. We sold several copies of our latest book, Come Hell or High Water, as well as lots of classics… All in all, AK had a great time attending the L.A Anarchist Bookfair. We thank the organizers for the invite, and look forward to the next one!

Suzanne: Before we wrap this up, there’s one serious thing that we need to mention, which is that on his way home from speaking at the bookfair, Ojore Lutalo (anarchist and longtime Black Liberation political prisoner, just released in August) was arrested on an Amtrak train in Colorado and charged with “endangering public transportation,” supposedly because of a political conversation he was having on a personal phone call. He is now out on bail but in need of support (and donations). Read more about his arrest here (and click links at the end of the article for more recent updates).

Suzanne setting up the AK table A thing of beauty!