An anarchist bookfair is an exhibition for anti-authoritarian literature often combined with anarchist social and cultural events. They have existed since at least 1983, beginning in London, and are held either annually or sporadically. Some have speakers or other events related to anarchist culture.
Anarchist bookfairs have existed since at least 1983. [1] They are community-organized, held either annually or sporadically, and usually last between a day and a weekend. [2] [1] At these fairs, anarchist publishers sell literature from booths to an internal audience of other anarchists and anarchist publishers. [1] They are also social events, as the distribution of publication brings those sympathetic to anarchism together to exchange ideas and organize according to their shared interest. [2] Bookfairs are not intended to replace external political activism or fight capitalism, but serve as a space for anarchist activists to build networks and experience social togetherness. [3]
London has hosted annual anarchist bookfairs since 1983, first in Conway Hall and later in Park View School. Other British locales including Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Manchester have hosted anarchist book fairs. [1]
The annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair began in 1995. [4] Held in Golden Gate Park and organized by Bound Together, the fair includes West Coast alternative publishers and organizations such as Food Not Bombs. Speakers have included Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carol Queen, [5] artist Eric Drooker, activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, [4] and publisher Bruce Anderson. [6] The 2005 event had 75 vendors including AK Press, who had the largest booth. [4] Los Angeles also hosts an anarchist bookfair. [2]
Elsewhere in the United States, the annual New York Anarchist Book Fair has run since the mid-2000s in Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park. It has included workshops on topics such as food sovereignty and medicinal plants. [7] The Boston anarchist bookfair influenced the Scranton Radical Book Fair in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which ran at least three years and included a Really Really Free Market. [8] [9]
The Montreal Anarchist Book Fair (French : Salon du livre anarchiste de Montréal) has occurred annually since at least 2009. It attracts anti-capitalists and activists including anarchoprimitivists, Marxists, queer groups, and skinheads. [10] An article in Lien social et Politiques called the Montreal Anarchist Book Fair and Festival of Anarchy together the largest annual gathering of its kind in North America. [11] The fair inspired Expozine, a small press, zine, and comics fair in Montreal, which began in 2002. [12] Victoria, British Columbia, also hosts an anarchist bookfair. [13]
Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and seeks to abolish the institutions they claim maintain coercion and hierarchy, typically including, though not necessarily limited to, the state and capitalism. As a historically left-wing movement, placed on the farthest left of the political spectrum, it is usually described alongside communalism and libertarian Marxism as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement.
AK Press is a worker-managed, independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical left and anarchist literature. Operated out of Chico, California, the company is collectively owned.
Anarchism in the United States began in the mid-19th century and started to grow in influence as it entered the American labor movements, growing an anarcho-communist current as well as gaining notoriety for violent propaganda of the deed and campaigning for diverse social reforms in the early 20th century. By around the start of the 20th century, the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed and anarcho-communism and other social anarchist currents emerged as the dominant anarchist tendency.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy that upholds liberty as a core value. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, and minimize the state's violation of individual liberties; emphasizing free association, freedom of choice, individualism and voluntary association. Libertarians often share a skepticism of authority and state power, but some libertarians diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems. Various schools of Libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling for the restriction or dissolution of coercive social institutions. Different categorizations have been used to distinguish various forms of Libertarianism. Scholars distinguish libertarian views on the nature of property and capital, usually along left–right or socialist–capitalist lines. Libertarians of various schools were influenced by liberal ideas.
Bluestockings is a radical bookstore, fair-trade café, and activist center located in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City. It is volunteer-supported and collectively owned. The store started in 1999 as a feminist bookstore and was named for a group of Enlightenment intellectual women, the Bluestockings.
Cindy Milstein is an American anarchist activist based in Brooklyn. They are an Institute for Anarchist Studies board member.
Anarchism in Canada spans a range of anarchist philosophy including anarchist communism, green anarchy, anarcho-syndicalism, individualist anarchism, as well as other lesser known forms. Canadian anarchism has been affected by thought from Great Britain, and continental Europe, although recent influences include a look at North American indigenism, especially on the West Coast. Anarchists remain a focal point in media coverage of globalization protests in Canada, mainly due to their confrontations with police and destruction of property.
Contemporary anarchism within the history of anarchism is the period of the anarchist movement continuing from the end of World War II and into the present. Since the last third of the 20th century, anarchists have been involved in anti-globalisation, peace, squatter and student protest movements. Anarchists have participated in violent revolutions such as in those that created the Free Territory and Revolutionary Catalonia, and anarchist political organizations such as the International Workers' Association and the Industrial Workers of the World have existed since the 20th century. Within contemporary anarchism, the anti-capitalism of classical anarchism has remained prominent.
Gabriel Kuhn is a political writer and translator based in Sweden.
Social anarchism, sometimes referred to as red anarchism, is the branch of anarchism that sees individual freedom as interrelated with mutual aid. Social anarchist thought emphasizes community and social equality as complementary to autonomy and personal freedom. It attempts to accomplish this balance through freedom of speech, which is maintained in a decentralized federalism, with freedom of interaction in thought and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is best defined as "that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry" and that "[f]or every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them", or the slogan "Do not take tools out of people's hands".
Expozine is an annual small press, zine and comics fair in Montreal, Quebec. It is reported to be Canada's largest zine fair and one of the largest small press fairs in North America attracting some 270 exhibitors and 15,000 visitors each autumn.
Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow is a 2006 book about anarchism and left-libertarian thought in Britain written by David Goodway and published by PM Press.
Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman is a 2012 history book about Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. The book was co-authored by the father-daughter pair Paul and Karen Avrich, and posthumously published after Paul's death. It was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice for 2012.
Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America is a 1995 oral history book of 53 interviews with anarchists over 30 years by Paul Avrich.
Bound Together is an anarchist bookstore and visitor attraction on Haight Street in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Its Lonely Planet review in 2016, commenting on its multiple activities, states that it "makes us tools of the state look like slackers". The bookstore carries new and used books as well as local authors.
Self-managed social centers, also known as autonomous social centers, are self-organized community centers in which anti-authoritarians put on voluntary activities. These autonomous spaces, often in multi-purpose venues affiliated with anarchism, can include bicycle workshops, infoshops, libraries, free schools, free shops, meeting spaces and concert venues. They often become political actors in their own right.
Anarchist archives preserve records from the international anarchist movement in personal and institutional collections around the world. This primary source documentation is made available for researchers to learn directly from movement anarchists, both their ideas and lives.
La Société mourante et l'anarchie, translated as Moribund Society and Anarchy, is an 1893 book by Jean Grave that argues for the speedy disintegration of moribund societal institutions.
Anarchism and libertarianism, as broad political ideologies with manifold historical and contemporary meanings, have contested definitions. Their adherents have a pluralistic and overlapping tradition that makes precise definition of the political ideology difficult or impossible, compounded by a lack of common features, differing priorities of subgroups, lack of academic acceptance, and contentious, historical usage.
Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 1915–1940, is a book by historian Travis Tomchuk on early 20th century Italian anarchists in Canada and the United States.
Media related to Anarchist book fairs at Wikimedia Commons
