Class War in Barcelona: Chris Ealham’s Anarchism and the City
By kate | November 24, 2010
Nice mini-review of Chris Ealham’s tremendous book, Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937 from our friends at the Kate Sharpley Library. Check it out!
Anarchism and the City
Class War in Barcelona: “Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937″ by Chris Ealham [Review]
M. BookuninAnarchism is more than just the idea of stateless socialism, and the movement is always shaped by the environment where it grows. In Anarchism and the City, Ealham’s focus is not personalities or philosophies, but anarchist activity and how it connected to working class life. He covers the context it evolved and operated in, including the ideas and actions of ruling class.
This is an academic book, so you get the language of the specialist: “Consistent with the culture of working class resistance to the spatial logic of bourgeois control in the city and betraying signs of earlier protest repertoires, those deemed responsible for the military coup were punished through the destruction of their property.” (p185) Thankfully, it’s not incomprehensible, and even gets poetic at times: “L’Opinió [left-wing Republican paper] printed a section entitled ‘The Robbery of the Day’ in which minor non-violent thefts were described sensationally as if the streets were teeming with blood-crazed felons.” (p151)
You get some great stories about what the anarchists (and workers) did, from the CNT Public Services Union tunnelling into the Model Jail in the December 1933 insurrection (p136) to the revolutionary recycling of 1936: “In one barri the local church was converted into a cinema. Elsewhere, confession boxes were used as newspaper kiosks, market stalls and bus shelters…” (p187)
Ealham doesn’t just say what happened, but why. He records the actions and ideas of the powerful, but he’s especially strong on the connection between the anarchists and the working class communities they lived in. This is the key to the book. The strength of the CNT was not in the numbers at conferences, but the numbers it could call on on the streets:
“One of the great paradoxes of the CNT was that, despite its huge membership in the city, the number of union activists was relatively small. … Besides their higher degree of class consciousness – activists were commonly known as ‘the ones with ideas’ (los con ideas) – there was nothing in their dress, lifestyle, behaviour, experiences, speech or place of residence to set them apart from the rest of the workers and, whether at a public meeting, a paper sale, in the factory or the cafe, activists could convey and disseminate ideas in a way that workers found both convincing and understandable.” (p41-2) And the tactics they used were connected to working-class life too: “CNT tactics like boycotts, demonstrations and strikes built on neighbourhood sociability: union assemblies mirrored working-class street culture, and the reciprocal solidarity of the barris was concretised and given organisational expression by the support afforded to confederated unions.” (p36)
This is an epic contribution to the history of anarchism and like the best history books leaves you wanting more (even if you don’t agree with all of Ealham’s perspectives). Today’s anarchist activists (from syndicalists to insurrectionaries) will find some fascinating stories here. But more importantly, they will find food for thought about where were are, where we want to be, and how we get there. If you have a new world in your heart, read this and start asking who’s going to help you build it.
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Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair
By jessica | November 23, 2010
I recently had the pleasure of tabling at the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair. (I love to table. I am a tabling robot. I am speaking in a robot voice.) I flew out of Baltimore on Friday 10/8 to head to Edmonton. My flight got in at 11:30 or something ridiculous like that, and bookfair organizers Sean and Jeff were kind enough to pick me up from the airport and take me to a DANCE PARTY! I was so gruesomely tired and luckily the dancing part was winding down so I didn’t have to limp around the dance floor like the old jet-lagged hag that I was. This turned out to be great as it gave me a chance to mill about and talk to some new folks. Yay talking to new folks at anarchist bookfairs! After the party I was ushered to my accommodations (or “billets” in Canadian), which were at the house of a friend of theirs who happened to be out of town all weekend. I had a shower in my room, which was very luxurious, and good wireless so I could obsessively check my email throughout the night. A far cry from the sleeping bag on the floor that I’m used to when tabling.
Saturday morning I woke up refreshed at a mad decent hour, caffeinated myself, walked around the neighborhood a bit, and strolled the leisurely 5 blocks to the site of the bookfair. Finding a farmers market on the way was a bonus, so I picked up some fruit and carrots to munch on throughout the day (not realizing that the bookfair organizers had an entire kitchen crew working all weekend to feed the speakers, tablers, and bookfair-goers. They made freaking sushi and samosas and stew and they were awesome). The bookfair took place at the Cosmopolitan Music Center and attached community center. I rearranged the table, put out new stock and settled in with the Edmonton Wobs on one side, and Black Books Distro from Edmonton on the other. Some of the other vendors were Black Cat Press, PM Press, Black Sheep Collective in Calgary, Migratory Words Literary Collective, Vegan Outreach in Edmonton, Make Total Distro, ThoughtcrimeInk, and more!
Saturday night there was another dance party. The theme for the night: Pajamarchy! I’m not gonna lie; there was a whole lot of no-pants going on. This was followed by an after-party, which was followed by an after-after-party (which may or may not have taken place in a drained swimming pool, and which I very wisely decided to forego, though I hear it was fun!). Gotta give a shout out to organizers who make sure that dance parties get built in to anarchist bookfairs.
On Sunday I was hungover and wore my sunglasses inside! A new friend brought me a gatorade! I did a lot of trade sales! It was great!
Workshops throughout the weekend included “What is Capitalism? What is Revolution?”, “Beyond Resistance: Logistics of Struggle”, “The Web of Struggles: Organizing Across Multiple Sites of Oppression” hosted by No One is Illegal, and “Community Organizing 101: How to talk to (and work with) Non-Anarchists.” I didn’t see any of them, because I was at the table selling a crap-ton of books. Folks were pretty excited to get the new AK titles without the insane cost of international shipping. AK Thompson’s Black Bloc, White Riot was a huge hit, along with Cindy Milstein’s Anarchism and Its Aspirations.
There were a lot of really cool folks there and it was my pleasure to make their acquaintance. Also, I didn’t realize how far north Edmonton is. I looked at in on a map after I got there and had a panic attack that I was at the top of the freaking world and might fly off into the outer atmosphere! But I didn’t. I got back to Baltimore Monday night, lighter by one mostly-empty tube of toothpaste confiscated by customs officers. And I didn’t even get run out of the country for telling the best Canadian anarchist joke ever! Okay, okay, I’ll tell it…
Why do Canadian anarchists like bagels?
Because they’re a circle, eh?
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Left Forum 2011
By kate | November 22, 2010
We just received the call for participation for Left Forum 2011! Check it out … and, hey all you AK authors: you should really think about proposing a panel for this year’s conference! It’s a great event, and we’ll be there tabling, as always! It would be nice to see a larger anarchist presence this year …
Left Forum
Text reads:
Left Forum Conference: Pace University, March 18-20 2011
Towards a Politics of Solidarity
This year’s Left Forum will focus on the age-old theme of solidarity: the moral act of imagination underpinning working class victories everywhere. It will undertake to examine the new forms of far-reaching solidarity that are both necessary and possible in an increasingly global world.
The spread and intensification of capitalism across the globe binds people together in complex interdependencies – as producers, consumers, victims, and insurgents. And as this process continues, the connections between people become more evident. The rebel Zapatistas in the Lacandon jungle understood clearly that the North American Free Trade Agreement forged in Washington was a direct threat to their traditional way of life and their aspirations for the future.
The potential for transformative struggles in the 21st century depends on new chains of solidarity—between workers in the rich world and workers in the global south, indigenous peasants and more affluent consumers, students and pensioners, villagers in the Niger Delta and environmental campaigners in the Gulf of Mexico, marchers and rioters in Greece and Spain, and unionists in the United States and China.
This year’s Left Forum will contribute to the intellectual underpinnings of new and tighter forms of world-wide solidarity upon which all successful emancipatory struggles of the future will depend.
Please join us once again in building upon the successes of last year’s conference – 200+ panels, 600+ speakers, 3000+ attendees, art shows and theater performances, and plenaries that included Arundhati Roy, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Noam Chomsky.
The conference will be held from March 18-20, 2011, at Pace University in NYC. Early registration discounts are available for a limited time – register now!
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WORK: A 2011 Calendar by Justseeds and AK Press
By kate | November 19, 2010
Hi friends! Today is technically my day “off” so I’m going to take a bit of a cop-out on blogging today and leave you with a bit of text, and some lovely images from the inside of AK’s brand-new wall-calendar WORK, a collaboration with the wonderful folks over at the Justseeds Artists Collective. Friend of mine described it last night as an “art of the month” calendar, meaning that there’s not much space to write notes to yourself, but the twelve four-color, offset printed, oversize images we’ve chosen to include are sure to brighten your darkest days and provide some food for thought. Be sure to order a copy today, and, while you’re at it, why not buy a few to give as gifts this year to all the hard-workers you know? You won’t be sorry!
WORK: A 2011 Calendar from Justseeds & AK Press
What is work? In a broad sense, “work” is the activities that produce a result; for our concerns, let’s call that “social wealth.” Yet it’s a question that begs so many more—perhaps none more pressing than “What should work be?” We all have ideas of what work shouldn’t be: mind-numbing, exploitative, hierarchical, dangerous, disempowering, etc. Though things get muddled when we try and flip the question around.
When we say that work should be creative, just, cooperative, healthy, and empowering we are laying an ethical, more than practical, groundwork. Ethics alone won’t help us solve questions such as “What share of the social wealth and I due for the time I spend at work?”; “Does my time parenting contribute to the social wealth to the same degree as my work as an electrician?”; “How do we place value on different kinds of work that each contribute to the social wealth?”; “If I choose not to contribute to the creation of social wealth, am I guaranteed any part of it?” These aren’t trivial questions—nor are they entirely new. But before we get too philosophical about it, let’s remember that at the end of the day, the water still has to flow from the tap, we need eyeglasses, and food and shelter are a must. So yes, the struggle to re-envision work is ethical, philosophical, theoretical, and practical.
And if work provides social wealth for all, perhaps we should make a distinction between working to produce for the good of all and working for a paycheck. Is it possible that our economy morph into one based on reciprocity instead of profit motive? Can we erode class society by building institutions and practice that militate against it? Can we create a sense of pride and dignity in our work practices, with a domino effect of solidarity to follow?
So we have before us a calendar produced by the hard-working aesthetes at Justseeds. For every month there’s a new image relating to our topic of work: be it the pleasure of work itself, the hard times, the fight for our rights, the global financial system and its creep into our world of work, or the fight for control over our lives.
Let’s spend this year thinking about the world of work, our own and that going on all around us.And let’s peer into how it numbs minds, exploits, kills, and disempowers and how it could be creative, just, cooperative, healthy, and empowering. Maybe after next year we’ll be that much more prepared to answer the perennial question, “What should work be?”
(Click on any of the images below to see a larger version!)
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Holy shit: Signs of Change is here!
By kate | November 18, 2010
It’s here! We thought this day would never come, but Signs of Change, the stunning visual archive of over five decades of social movement art edited by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee (in association with NYC’s Exit Art gallery) has arrived, and it looks phenomenal. Worth the wait, if we do say so ourselves.
As some of you may know, during the final stages of completing Signs of Change, editor and friend Dara Greenwald was diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer. After multiple surgeries and treatments, Dara is on the road to recovery, but she’s still not out of danger, and she’s unable to work to support herself. With Josh serving has her primary caregiver, his availability to work is also severely limited. We need your help to support our friends during this difficult time! AK Press will donate the profits from all sales of the book on our website or at AK Press tables in the month of November, directly to Dara’s health fund. Don’t delay—order your copy today! (And, be sure to check out http://www.healdarag.org, to find out about other ways you can help support Dara and Josh.)
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Kolya Abramsky on Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution
By kate | November 17, 2010
Don’t know if I mentioned it in a recent post or not, but out here in Baltimore, we’re right in the middle of a run of five AK Press related events co-hosted with Red Emma’s. We started on November 4 with Raúl Zibechi on Dispersing Power, and then followed that up with Kolya Abramsky on Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution and Ben Dangl on Dancing with Dynamite last week, and are finishing off the run with Eddie Conway (by speakerphone) last night (Tuesday), and our monthly Radical Publishing Happy Hour (read: cocktail party at the AK Baltimore warehouse!) on Thursday. Whew!
BUT, back last week, we had author and energy activist Kolya Abramsky here with us in Baltimore for a few days, and we managed to get a recording of his talk at Red Emma’s on the collection he edited for AK Press this past spring, called Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World. If you haven’t checked out this book yet, you really should—it’s massive, with essays documenting and discussing energy struggles in more than 50 nations around the world. This is the definitive volume on energy struggles and the crisis of capitalism, and, as the heated debate after Kolya’s Baltimore event demonstrated, these issues are really in the fore of people’s minds right now.
Here’s a link to the audio of the talk. Be sure to check it out! And, more reports on AK events in Baltimore to come!
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Join us for cocktails in Baltimore!
By kate | November 16, 2010
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Dancing with Dynamite: Ben Dangl’s latest journalistic adventure
By kate | November 15, 2010
It’s been a good year for new titles on Latin America at AK Press: in addition to Jeff Conant’s Poetics of Resistance (on the Zapatista mythos) and Raul Zibechi’s Dispersing Power (on the Amarya struggles against the state in Bolivia), we’re tickled pink to have just recently released Dancing with Dynamite: States and Social Movements in Latin America, the second book-length work by award-winning political journalist Benjamin Dangl. AK first began working with Ben back in 2007, on his first book, The Price of Fire, which took a critical book at resource wars in Bolivia. Three years later, Price of Fire is still one of our best-selling titles, and we’re thrilled to now offer Dancing with Dynamite, which revisits some of those same struggles, but ultimately takes a wider and more varied perspective on Latin America as a region, profiling the relationship between states and social movements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, and Paraguay. Ben also turns his keen eye towards the homeland, positing the ways that social movements in the United States stand to benefit from, and have already benefited from, the example of movements in South America.
Sounds cool, right? It is. You might want to read Z-Net’s recent interview with Ben to get a bit more perspective on what the book attempts to accomplish (here), or check out Alternet’s interview with Ben, in which he discusses the dance between social movements and states in Latin America in more detail, and suggests some of the lessons we in the US have to learn from the Latin American example (here). Kari Lydersen reviewed the book right before it appeared in stores, and you can read that great review at In These Times (here). You might also want to check out the Dancing with Dynamite blog to see what Ben has been up to on his tour, or read his recent commentary at UpsideDownWorld.org & TowardFreedom.com.
We recently hosted an event for Ben on his east coast tour here in Baltimore at Red Emma’s, check out the audio from that event below:
And, finally, below you’ll find an excerpt from the Introduction of Dancing with Dynamite. Enjoy! And buy the book …
Introduction: Dancing with Dynamite
The motorcycle thundered off the highway onto a jungle road of loose red dirt framed by trees, families lounging in front of their farmhouses, and small herds of disinterested cows. We pulled up to a dusty store to buy food for our stay in the rural community of Oñondivepá, Paraguay, and asked the woman behind the counter what was available. She nodded her head, picked up a saw, and began hacking away at a large slab of beef. We strapped the meat and a box of beer on to the back of the motorcycle and roared off down the road.
A volleyball game was going on when we arrived in the area where landless activist Pedro Caballero lived. His wife offered us fresh oranges while his children ran around in the dirt, playing with some wide-eyed kittens. The sun had set, so Caballero’s wife lifted a light bulb attached to a metal wire onto an exposed electric line above the house, casting light on our small gathering of neighbors. Suddenly, the dogs jumped to action, joining in a barking chorus, and lunged toward the edge of the woods. They had found a poisonous snake, a common cause of death in this small community far from hospitals.
“We are the landless,” Caballero, a slight young man with shoulder length black hair, explained while peeling an orange for his young daughter. As a settler on the land, he works with his neighbors and nearby relatives to produce enough food for his family to survive. But he is up against a repressive state that either actively works against landless farmers, or ignores them. “No one listens to us, so we have to take matters into our own hands,” he said. Caballero spoke of the need to occupy land as a last resort for survival. “The legal route isn’t working, so we have to go for the illegal route, which does work.”(1)
Read the rest of this entry »
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Raúl Zibechi in the United States!
By kate | November 11, 2010
Are you in New York? Because if you are, you need to cancel all of your plans for tonight and head over to Bluestockings to catch Uruguayan political analyst Raúl Zibechi, in the United States for the first time since the ’80s, on a mini-east coast tour to discuss the first English edition of one of his many books: Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, published this summer by AK Press.
Dispersing Power provides a prescient analysis of social struggles in Bolivia and the forms of community power instituted by that country’s indigenous Aymara. Like the movements it describes, the book explores new ways of doing politics beyond the state, gracefully mapping the “how” of revolution, offering valuable lessons to activists and new theoretical frameworks for understanding how social movements can and do operate independently of state-centered models for social change. This new translation by Ramor Ryan (author of Clandestines) captures the intensity of the original Spanish-language edition, and includes a preface by John Holloway, a preface by Ben Dangl (who is also on the road, and missed Raúl by a day in NYC), and an afterword by Colectivos Situaciones.
Zibechi has already spoken to packed houses in Baltimore (at Johns Hopkins and at the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference), in Boston (at Encuentro 5), and in Amherst (Hampshire College & UCONN). He wraps up his first US tour in New York, with an event tonight (Thursday, November 11) at Bluestockings @ 7PM, and then another one tomorrow at the CUNY Graduate Center, @ 2PM. Don’t miss this opportunity!
If you’re not in the NYC area, then you might want to check out this recording Red Emma’s made of Zibechi’s talk at Johns Hopkins last week. His lecture there was entitled Suma Qamaña (Good Living) as an Alternative to the Crisis of our Civilization.
AK Press is already hard at work at additional translations of Zibechi’s works into English, so stay tuned for more! We’ll be trying to bring him back to the US in the Spring for a West Coast tour …
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We’re back!
By kate | November 10, 2010
After a several-week hiatus for system repairs and etc., the AK Press blog is back! Sorry for the lack of bloggage, we’ll be back on the air with a ton of new posts in the next couple of days.
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