by Eusi Kwayana

Revised Second Edition coming Fall 2014!

“Every man is his own leader and we are leaderless” — this was the organizational principle voiced by the Afro-Guyanese bauxite mine workers in the democratic councils and mass assemblies that characterized the bauxite strike of April 1970.

Originally published in 1972, Eusi Kwayana’s The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics examines the struggle for workers’ control in what was Guyana’s soon-to-be-nationalized bauxite industry. Kwayana’s account of these events underscores the workers’ conviction that “nationalization without workers’ control and workers’ self-management is a fraud.”

Over thirty leaflets, pamphlets, essays, editorials, and journalistic articles have been transcribed and reprinted in this volume, documenting the struggle for workers’ self-emancipation in Guyana from the bauxite strike of 1970 to the sugar workers’ rebellion of 1974.

“A must-read for all who are thinking about the rebuilding of a global Left movement.” — Paget Henry, author of Caliban’s Reason.

Price: $14.99

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by Nani Ferreira-Mathews

Drawing upon her experience as a person of both indigenous Hawaiian and Jewish heritage, Ferreira-Mathews reconsiders the popular Jewish-only “birthright” trips to Israel, a settler-colonialist nation, where national identity is so fundamentally entangled with the systematic displacement of native peoples.

“Today, more and more young Jews are waking up to the reality of Israel’s mounting human rights abuses, bearing witness to the continuing history of Palestinian dispossession, and standing in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and equality. … Mathews’s book is a vital part of this ongoing legacy of young Jewish awakening.”
— Ben Lorber, Jewish Voice for Peace

Price:$14.99

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by Lenni Brenner and Matthew Quest

A collection of selected essays by Lenni Brenner and Matthew Quest that discusses the historical response of African American freedom movements to the colonial settler state of Israel and its role in American Imperialism in the Middle East.

Among other topics and controversies, these essays provide independent analysis of Stokely Carmichael, James Forman, the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Harold Cruse, the Nation of Islam, Israel’s relationship to Apartheid South Africa, and the recent conflict between Alice Walker and the Anti-Defamation League.

“An informative, incisive, and essential historical analysis of the African American freedom movement’s solidarity with Palestine.” — Michael Letwin, co-founder of Labor for Palestine and Jews for Palestinian Right of Return.

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by Maurice Brinton

Originally published as a pamphlet in 1970, this small but exciting volume has been called a “classic” of libertarian socialism. Although the text is more than forty years old, its implications for revolutionary activism are as salient as ever.

“Chris Pallis (aka Maurice Brinton) was one of the most interesting libertarian writers of the second half of the 20th century…He was lively, with a punchy and accessible style, and a wicked sense of humour. In The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, his masterpiece, he charts the obliteration of the Russian Factory Committees… so that by 1921 Russian factories and trade unions had been subordinated to the new Bolshevik state and party.” — David Goodway, author of Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow.

Price: $20.00

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by Louise Michel, et al.

On 18 March 1871, enormous sections of the Parisian working class began a rebellion that shook the foundations of European society. The Commune: Paris, 1871 is a new collection of classic anarchist and libertarian-socialist studies of the Paris Commune uprising. This concise volume includes critical reflections on the Commune from such radical authors as Louise Michel, William Morris, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Voltairine de Cleyre, Alexander Berkman and Maurice Brinton.

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edited by Faith Beauchemin

NOW AVAILABLE!

How Queer!: Personal narratives from bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, sexually fluid and other non-monosexual perspectives, gathers together fourteen autobiographical essays written not by sociologists or professional activists, but by ordinary bisexual, pansexual, and sexually-fluid people. These writers come from diverse backgrounds, but their personal narratives explore overarching themes of non-monosexual visibility, activism, confrontation with homophobia and religious bias, and endlessly double-edged experiences in the LGBTQ community.

These stories help bring understanding to anyone who wants to learn more about gender and sexual identity—whether to help define their own journey, to grow their own awareness, or to build solidarity with one another.

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by David Weir

NOW AVAILABLE!

The son of Miguel Almereyda, an anarchist activist who died in prison, Jean Vigo kept faith with the politics of his father through his art. One of the most influential filmmakers in cinema history, Vigo gave aesthetic expression to anarchist ideology in four films: the city symphony À propos de Nice (1930), the sports documentary Taris ou la natation (1931), the medium-length Zéro de conduite (1933), and the feature-length L’Atalante (1934), currently ranked by the British Film Institute as the twelfth greatest film of all time. Although his career was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 29, Jean Vigo continues to be one of the most commanding figures in the history of cinema.

In this book, David Weir examines Vigo’s cinematic career in both the political and the cultural context of the interwar period in European history, taking stock of the ideological upheavals of the 1930s that plunged the continent into the horrors of fascism and war. Weir also explores Vigo’s relationship to other filmmakers of the period, such as Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, and Marcel Carné—all of whom, like Vigo, range across the leftist spectrum of the interwar years. In the end, Weir argues that, whereas L’Atalante and the other films have been mostly restored to something like their original condition, more work needs to be done to restore the original ideological meaning of those films.

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by Sen Katayama

Japan’s labor movement in the early twentieth century was one of the most vibrant and tumultuous periods in global social history. In their struggles for freedom, Japanese workers organized strikes, initiated riots, and planned imperial assassinations. Small groups of radical socialists and anarchists struggled to survive under extreme state suppression, mass arrests, and political executions. Sen Katayama, a founding figure in the Asian and Asian-American radical traditions, documents this history in his book, The Labor Movement in Japan.

“The life and career of Sen Katayama represented an incredible odyssey. Pioneer social worker, labor organizer, and leader in Japan’s radical political movement . . . Katayama wrote his important book, The Labor Movement in Japan, while in the U.S. in 1918. Unfortunately this study has been out of print for many years. We now have Robert Sabatino and Andrew Zonneveld to thank for making it available once more. Students of left-wing politics in Japan will find it a major source on the early twentieth century labor struggle.” — F.G. Notehelfer, author of Kōtoku Shusui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical.

Price:14.99

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Edited by Ole Birk Laursen

A collection of essays from a diverse group of writers originally published in the Dutch anti-militarist journal, De Wapens Neder (1935). These anarchist and socialist writers from Europe, Algeria, India, Japan, and the United States connected the struggles against fascism and imperialism in East Asia and Europe with anti-colonial struggles in India and Africa and the African American civil rights movement in the United States. This collection demonstrates the international scope and reach of anarchist and socialist anti-militarism in the 1930s.

Price: $9.99

Coming November 2019. Pre-order now!

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by Ida B. Wells

Lynch Law in Georgia & Other Writings is a collection of often neglected anti-lynching pamphlets by Ida B. Wells, the most dynamic anti-lynching activist in American History. Newly edited and introduced by historian Matthew Quest, this important collection of Ida B. Wells’s 1899-1920 anti-lynching pamphlets reflects a transition toward viewing lynchings as attacks on the potential of insurgent Black workers who defended and organized themselves for emancipation.

“Ida B. Wells offers a model of radical intellectual activism that a new generation needs to know about.…Lynch Law in Georgia and Other Writings brings forward again the work of a Black woman activist who provided leadership for a number of allied struggles for women’s rights and Black human rights.” — Carole Boyce Davies, author of Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones

March 2015 Sale Price: $9.99

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by Christian Høgsbjerg

Published by Redwords Publishing in London.

On Our Own Authority! is excited to announce a new edition of Christian Høgsbjerg’s biography of Chris Braithwaite, a leading organizer of colonial seamen in inter-war Britain. Braithwaite played a critical role in the Pan-Africanist and wider anti-colonial movement alongside figures such as C.L.R. James and George Padmore. Høgsbjerg’s book recovers Braithwaite’s long overlooked life as a Black radical and political trade unionist, and suggests his determined struggle for working class unity in the face of racism and austerity retains relevance for us today.

Price: $11.99

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by Kimathi Mohammed

Kimathi Mohammed’s Organization & Spontaneity, originally published in 1974, is a response to key contradictions of the late 1960s and early 1970s Black freedom movements that emphasizes the self-organization of ordinary African Americans and their liberating, self-directed activism.

“In every country today the masses are still violently opposed to the forces of oppression and exploitation.…And it has been the total refusal of the mass of the mass of populations to be governed by an oppressive system which has made revolution possible.” — Kimathi Mohammed, Organization & Spontaneity.

Price: $15.00

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by Modibo Kadalie

“Modibo Kadalie is a storyteller—in the most honorable and powerful sense of the word—who opens up the possibilities of fundamental social transformation [...] reminding us that power and truth always reside in the people, not their ‘leaders.’”
— Natsu Saito, author of Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists

Modibo Kadalie has spent nearly six decades as an activist, organizer, teacher, and scholar in the ongoing struggle for Pan-African freedom. In this collection of interviews and public talks, he reflects on the sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, urban rebellions, and anticolonialist movements that have animated the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Kadalie demonstrates how forms of directly democratic organizing that have evolved through these freedom struggles also present the promise of a ecological future. In so doing, he explains that direct democracy is the key to both Black liberation and ecological security.

This concise, radical, and iconoclastic book calls on present and future generations of activists to reconnect with the spirit of these movements without lionizing individual leaders or lending legitimacy to any government or politician.

Coming October 2019. Pre-order now!

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This new volume collects selected writings by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman that recount their experiences while exiled in Russia from 1920 to 1922. Famous essays like “Bolsheviks Shooting Anarchists,” “The Prisons of Russia,” and “There Is No Communism in Russia” are collected here alongside immortal pamphlets like The Crushing of the Russian Revolution, The Russian Tragedy, and The Kronstadt Rebellion.

Price: $20.00

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by Joseph Edwards

Joseph Edwards (born George Myers, also known as Fundi, the “Caribbean Situationist”) was a Jamaican refrigeration mechanic and labor organizer from West Kingston. Edwards led a wildcat strike and workers’ council at Western Meat Packers in Westmoreland, and was a major organizer of the Unemployed Workers Council and Independent Trade Union Advisory Council.

A profound critic of electoral party politics and trade union hierarchy, Edwards was among the most proletarian theorists of his generation. His pamphlets, written in the 1970s and ’80s, survey attempts to organize workers in banana and sugar cane fields, bauxite mines, clerical offices, and industrial factories. His unique writing emphasizes the role of workers’ and village councils in Caribbean class struggle. The first published collection of writings by Joseph Edwards, Workers Self-Management in the Caribbean transforms how we understand class struggle during Caribbean New Left generation.

“[Joseph Edwards] was always involved in a practical way with the struggle of the dispossessed and the exploited for a new world. There was never a moment in his life when he was not engaged with some form of organization whether on the sugar plantation, in the factories or in the communities around Westmoreland. There is no figure in Caribbean radical history of the 1960s and 1970s that I respect more.” — Bukka Rennie, author of The History of the Trinidad & Tobago Working Class in the 20th Century.

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by Lenni Brenner

Lenni Brenner has been an anti-war and anti-racist activist since the early 1950s. Originally published in 1983, Brenner’s famous book documents the interactions between the Zionist movement and the rise of Fascism in Europe during the first half of the 20th century, and clarifies that Zionist colonialism has no legitimate historical claim to anti-racism or anti-fascism. The 2014 edition of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators features a new Afterword by the author.

“Short, crisp, and carefully documented. Mr Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where Zionists collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes, including Hitler’s.” – Edward Mortimer, The Times (London)

“Brenner reviews the efforts of the Jewish establishment of the war years to play down, even to conceal, reports of the camps in Europe for fear of inciting anti-semitism at home.” – David Lan, London Review of Books

Price: $22.00

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by Modibo Kadalie

Published by One Quest Press in Savannah, Georgia.

During the early and middle 1970′s, Modibo Kadalie was an active member of several radical organizations. In the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), he served as a member of the Central Staff and Chair of the People’s Action Committee. in Highland Park, Michigan. In the International African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), Kadalie was a founding member of the National Steering Committee. He chaired the Detroit local committee in 1972 and 1973, and then continued as a member of the expanded International Steering Committee as a representative from Atlanta, 1973-1975. Within this Sixth Pan-African Congress, he chaired the Southern Regional Organizing Committee from 1974-1975 and was also a member of both the North American Delegation and the North American Left Revolutionary Pan-African Caucus.

“This is serious, definative, and useful scholarship that requires a rethinking of what happened between the end of the Civil rights Movement and the struggle for Black liberation…Kadalie has closed a critical lacuna between the 1960s and the end of the 20th century. This study requires that we look back, if we are to prevent the future from rushing into the past.” — Rickey Hill, Professor and Chair , Department of History and Political Science, South Carolina State University.

Price: $25.00

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