Edited and introduced by Gale Ahrens, here, for the first time, is a hefty selection of the writings and speeches of the woman the Chicago police called "More dangerous than a thousand rioters!""Lucy Parsons' writings are among the best and strongest in the history of US anarchism. Her long and often traumatic experience of the capitalist injustice system-from the KKK terror in her youth, through Haymarket and the judicial murder of her husband, to the US government's war on the Wobblies-made her not 'just another victim' but an extraordinarily articulate witness to, and vehement crusader against, all injustice." -from the introduction, by Gale Ahrens"Lucy Parsons' personae and historical role provide material for the makings of a truly exemplary figure.....anarchist, labor organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and dynamic speaker, a woman of color of mixed black, Mexican and Native American heritage, a founder of the 1880s Chicago Working Women's Union that organized garment workers, called for equal pay for equal work, and even invited housewives to join with the demand of wages for housework; and later (1905) co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which made the organizing of women and people of color a priority..... For a better understanding of the concept of direct action and its implications, no other historical figure can match the lessons provided by Lucy Parsons." -from the afterword, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity, Writings & Speeches, 1878-1937

Literature & Fiction

Parsons, Lucy

Poetry

AK Press

Fetish Witch

Arts & Photography

Marquis and Peter W Czernich

Photography & Video

"Sam Tracy is the world's Most Dangerous Bike Mechanic! He wants you to ENJOY fixing your bike! He not only wants you to adjust your own bike, he wants you to adjust your attitude! His no-nonsense midwestern radicalism blasts the lycra-chrome designer consumerism that plagues bicycling in its place he asserts the autonomy and human freedom he fervently believes a daily bicyclist can enjoy. This visionary prole hurls invective and epithets, lampoons pretensions and sparks our imaginations. Fix your bike? Sure! Fix the world, too? Why not?!?" Chris Carlsson , Critical Mass pioneer

How To Rock and Roll : A City Rider's Repair Manual

Sports & Outdoors

Sam Tracy

Individual Sports

Chile: Promise of Freedom features -interviews with Isabel Allende, Ariel Dorfman, Isabel Letelier, and people in global pursuit of the Pinochet/Kissinger cases, as well as the archived voices of Salvador Allende, his supporters, and witnesses of the 1973 coup.The story documents the events from the rise of the Allende-led Popular Unity government, the bloody coup, the disappeared, and the emerging democratic process.This exciting two-part CD weaves interview, music, archival recordings, poetry, and analysis to create a gripping tapestry of events.Based in San Francisco, The Freedom Archives contain over 5000 hours of audio tape recordings, documenting, as they happened, the most turbulent events and important movements from the early ’60s to today.

Chile: Promise of Freedom (AK Press Audio)

History

The Freedom Archives

Americas

On October 23, 2006, a group of activists brought land struggle to the US. After seizing public land in Liberty City, FL, the Umoja Village Shantytown was born.

Take Back the Land

Business & Money

Max Rameau

Economics

Ideas are embedded in social arrangements, which in turn produce effects. With this simple premise, this radically accessible systems design book makes a compelling case for arrangements as a rich and overlooked terrain for social justice and world building. Unpacking how ideas like racism and sexism remain sturdy by embedding themselves in everything from physical and social infrastructure to everyday speech and thought habits, this book gives readers the tools to sense, intervene in and imagine new arrangements. Using diverse examples from their work and others, DS4SI offers readers a roadmap for using social interventions to invite the larger public into imagining and creating a more just and vibrant world. 'Throughout their work, DS4SI strives to enact the principle that design is not just about problem-solving within existing paradigms and social orders, it is about world building, about imagining and constructing new territories of life and difference... This is design's imagination at its best, the grounds for a genuinely transformative design praxis. It is a route to disclosing new worlds and bringing them into existence.' -- Arturo Escobar, author of Designing the Pluriverse. 'As we face this dire moment of climate change, tyranny, mass extinction and international war on the global scale, and poverty, housing shortages, and stagnant wages at home, we need tools that we can use to address these problems, and it can't be just the same old tools we've been using all along. This is where this excellent guide to ideas-arrangements-effects comes in.' -- Mindy Thompson Fullilove, author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It.

Ideas Arrangements Effects

Social Intervention, The Design Studio for

Graphic Design

Part literary criticism, part media analysis, and part marketing handbook, A Poetics of Resistance provides a refreshingly new take on the Zapatistas. While much has been written on the history of the Zapatista insurgency and on the communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos, very little has been said about Zapatismo: the ideologies, organizing methodologies, and communications strategies of the movement. The appeal of the Zapatistas, and their survival, has as much to do with their goals as with the compelling and wildly effective language and aesthetics they’ve used to convey their vision. Weaving together varied elements of poetics and symbolism, Zapatismo has emerged as something entirely new: a resolutely radical public relations campaign for human liberation.
The first postmodern revolution” presented itself to the world through a complex and evolving web of propaganda, using a wide range of media: the colorful communiqués of Marcos; the ski masks, uniforms, toy dolls, and other accoutrements of the insurgent or sympathizer; and murals, songs, and other popular cultural forms. Employing persuasive publicity, myths, and symbols, the Zapatistas both communicated their message and developed a clear aesthetic that could contain many messages at once and self-replicate on a global scale. Jeff Conant offers an engaging and innovative tool for organizers and educators to understand how the Zapatistas' strategy works, and to continue developing and refining their effective messages of participatory, bottom-up revolution.
Jeff Conant is a writer and activist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the author of A Community Guide to Environmental Health.

A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency

Conant, Jeff

From nineteenth-century newspaper publishers to the protesters in the Battle of Seattle” and the recent Greek uprising, anarchists have long been incited to action by the ideal of a free society of free individuals”a transformed world in which people and communities relate to each other intentionally and 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 the history and hopeful future of this vision for a better world. The book quickly brings even the uninitiated reader up to speed with a crash course on some of the most influential anarchists in history and their ideas about how we might achieve the transformation of society. From there, the book looks at how these principles have been put into practice by groups such as the Situationist International, social ecologists, Zapatistas, anti-globalization activists, and other directly democratic organizations and communities in their respective struggles against capitalism and state control.
Laying out a clear introduction to some of the main ideas behind an often-misunderstood political philosophy, Anarchism and Its Aspirations helps us imagine the vast possibility of a truly free and democratic society.
Cindy Milstein is an activist and educator from Vermont. She serves on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, co-organizes the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, and is a collective member at Black Sheep Books. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including Realizing the Impossible, Confronting Capitalism, and Globalize LiberationX.

Anarchism and Its Aspirations (Anarchist Interventions)

Politics & Social Sciences

Milstein, Cindy

Anthropology

“Basically, anarchy is in fact the only political position that is actually possible.”—from the interview with Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta
We all know that there is a deeply entwined relationship between personal politics and works of fiction. For centuries, authors have used the veil of fiction to cast a critical eye toward the larger society around them: think of Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, Issac Asimov, Margaret Atwood, Aldous Huxley, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, and even Mary Shelley. Now, for the first time, in an unprecedented new release from AK Press, some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction discuss this relationship with a specific focus on anarchist politics.
Sci-fi powerhouses Ursula K. LeGuin, Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock, and Lewis Shiner join activist authors Derrick Jensen, Starhawk, Cristy C. Road, and a variety of other up-and-coming young writers in a series of interviews that explore fiction’s deeply political roots. Ranging in scope from serious political discussions to hilarious personal anecdotes, the interviews collected here paint an intimate portrait of the author as a political agent.
Compiled and annotated by SteamPunk Magazine founder Margaret Killjoy, and with an introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers is an engaging and highly readable book—a must-read for any serious fan of sci-fi or political fiction, and a useful tool for both new and seasoned authors interested in developing their own political utopias.

Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction

History & Criticism

Nunzio Pernicone’s biography uses Carlo Tresca’s (1879-1943) storied life?as newspaper editor, labor agitator, anarchist, anti-communist, street fighter, and opponent of fascism?as a springboard to investigate Italian immigrant and radical communities in the United States. From his work on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee, and his assassination on the streets of New York City, Tresca’s passion left a permanent mark on the American map.
This edition, both revised and expanded, provides new insight into the American labor movement and a unique perspective on the immigrant experience.
Nunzio Pernicone is a professor of history at Drexel University.

Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel

Biographies & Memoirs

Pernicone, Nunzio

Community & Culture

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Books by AK Press