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ALL you need to know about the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair

Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.

The Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair is this weekend, March 14–15 in San Francisco at Golden Gate Park. And A.L.L. is going to be there. Here’s a partial schedule:

Schedule for speakers in the auditorium

Auditorium, SATURDAY 3/14

11:30 – 11:50 Bruce Anderson
12:00 – 12:20 James Tracy – Anti-Authoritarian Approaches to Housing
12:30 – 1:20 Diane Di Prima
1:30 – 1:50 Summer Brenner – I-5
2:00 – 2:50 Judith Levine – Kids, Sex & the State
3:00 – 3:20 Diana Block – Arm the Spirit
3:30 – 4:20 Native American Perspectives On the State
4:30 – 4:50 Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz

Auditorium, SUNDAY 3/15

12:00 – 12:50 Sex Workers Panel
1:00 – 1:20 Barry Pateman
1:30 – 1:50 Chris Carlsson
2:00 – 2:20 Cheb –i- Sabbha
2:30 – 2:50 Andrej Grubacic – Wobblies & Zapatistas
3:00 – 3:20 Victoria Law – Resistance Behind Bars
3:30 – 4:30 Osha Neumann – Up A**inst the W*ll Motherfucker

Schedule of speakers/events in the cafe area:

Cafe SATURDAY:

10:00 – 10:50 Resist War Taxes
11:00 – 11:20 Matt Callahan
11:30 – 12:20 Surviving The Economic Meltdown Panel (Robert Ovetz & others)
12:30 – 12:50 Yiddish Anarchism – Audrey Goodfriend & Joel Schechter
1:00 – 1:20 RNC8 Defense Committee
1:30 – 1:50 Doug – Modesto Anarcho – Importance of Intentions in Anarchist Actions
2:00 – 2:50 Eastern European Anarchism panel w/ Andrej Grubajic and Marta Kolarova
3:00 – 3:50 Women In Prison Panel w/Bo Brown & Vikki Law
4:00 – 4:50 Becoming the Media Panel – Jen Angel, Pranjal Tiwari, Joe Biel
5:00 – 5:50 Intro to Lefty/Anarchist Sci-Fi with Sara Brodzinsky

Cafe SUNDAY:

11:00 – 11:50 Resist War Taxes
12:00 – 12:50 Shutdown filmscreening and discussion
1:00 – 1:50 Venezuela: Revolution From Inside Out screening & disc with filmmaker Clif Ross
2:00 – 2:50 Provo Panel/Discussion, Stevphen Shukaitis & Richard Kempton
3:00 – 3:50 Art & Activism Panel/Discussion with Josh Macphee and Fly
4:00 – 4:50 Retort Panel: Iain Boal, David Kubrin and more

And, the main event — this is a bookfair, remember? — will be the space in the main hall, where about 60 vendors will have tables to show off their anarchist books and materials from 10:00am–6:00pm on Saturday and 11:00am–5:00pm on Sunday. Among them will be us — members of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left from around the Western U.S. I’ll be there (especially in the morning); and, if no-one encounters any unforeseen disasters, we should have Southern Nevada ALL, Northwest ALL, and ALLies from California and Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ll have books, journals, and buttons for sale, and a lot of information about ALL and what we do back in our hometowns. If you’re in the area, come on by, say hi, and see what we’re doing.

bookfairvendors

We’ll be here. Will you?

Hope to see you there!

15 replies to ALL you need to know about the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair Use a feed to Follow replies to this article · TrackBack URI

  1. Nick Manley

    Damn. I should have finally put together the finishing touches for my next trip to San Francisco for this.

    Have fun!

  2. Nick Manley

    Charles,

    I wonder if all the abortion rights groups in the U.S. have or could ever obtain enough funding to completely usurp the welfare state. That would put an end to diverting resources to combat things like Republican bans on use of Federal funds for assisting women in obtaining abortions.

    Just bypass the establishment theocrats with grassroots culture! Every penny spent on a politician to achieve something is one less penny spent on the kinds of non-profits below:

    http://womensmedicalfundwis.org/

  3. Nick Manley

    And you can use the conservative’s much vaunted state’s rights rhetoric against them with local abortion rights victories — particularly when they have more control or influence at the Federal level. The medical marijuana movement is having some fairly good success on the state level. The Feds just recently did the minimum of announcing an end to DEA raids in states that have legalized it. I have taken a more liberal “Federalist” position before, but the reality is that there is a good chance of central power eventually shifting back to social conservative elements of the Republican Party — not to mention the Democratic Party’s own contributions to demolishing separation of church and state.

    I once thought about going to my professional feminist stepcousin to try to get involved in strategic policy discussions with the D.C. abortion rights groups. I was pondering what kind of capital existed among well to do coastal groups for funding more clinics in areas where they don’t exist — given the fact that abortion is de facto taboo in like 90 percent of the country for reasons of access and local sentiment, no?

  4. Darian W

    I just added new subversion squares to http://nj.libertarianleft.org/resources.html. You might be interested in using some of them.

· April 2009 ·

  1. Nick Manley

    ALLies,

    I and other people may be at Porcfest this year to table. I am honestly interested in hanging with cool subversives — regardless of whether I am contributing to saving the world.

    Does anyone have suggestions for material? I really think that we should stand out relative to other groups.

    Something along the lines of “We support teens against Christianist parents” or something…I’ll stow you away in my house and talk philosophy.

    That’d earn us the ire of the Libertarian parental control crowd, but why would we care? ( :

  2. Nick Manley

    Soviet Onion,

    I’ve pondered suggesting to you that you use some of Aster’s material you appreciated on cultural liberty. She’s likely to read this, so if she approves, then I advise you two talk it over.

    We do have some other writers in our canon on these issues too…still: it’s good to survey your options. I’ll contribute something original. We’d just need to put it in some kind of printed form.

    I posted this on here, because I strongly believe you won’t view it as a violation of your privacy.

    Anyhow, I am out. I have class tomorrow and things to ponder.

    Bon Voyage!

    Er..

    Avoir!

  3. Nick Manley

    Soviet Onion? Are you listening? ( :

  4. Soviet Onion

    Sorry, I neglect to pay attention to older posts in the sidebar.

    Yeah, I’ve been looking for some culturally-oriented pieces to include, with some of Aster’s old blog postings in mind. My only concern is that she might not hold those views anymore.

    In any case, I assume you guys would also have better suggestions than anything I could think of. My email is crimsonavalon [at] gmail.com. Lay it on me. I can handle all formatting issues.

    So far we plan on having everything currently up at Invisible Molotov (linked in my name), Roderick’s “Rothbard’s Left & Right, 40 Years Later” (which I still have to format), the extra Market Anarchy pamphlets that Charles & co. made for the Bay Area fair (#’s 6-12, linked here) and however many issues of Chris Lempa’s ALLiance there are. I assume he’ll have a second issue out before June.

    Darian Worden’s also working on an anti-school zine, which sort of fits into what you were saying. On the counter-economic angle, Kevin Dean over at Bureaucrash Social has agreed to put together a how-to zine on homebrewing and I’m hoping to get a comprehensive piece on PGP together with Charles.

  5. Nick Manley

    Eh

    I’d say that Aster’s views on cultural liberty and criticisms of Libertarians derived therefrom are her more enduring ones. The ALL is still a relatively new viewpoint within Libertarian circles, so our attitude on these issues hasn’t made enough of a splash yet. Frankly, the value of Aster’s work on these issues is her in your face attitude. I want something that will give people a mindfuck. People who respond to mindfucks with a curious attitude are liable to be potential assets.

    Homebrewing, critiques of current educational paradigms, and PGP all sound decent. I’d say a focus on counter-economics is a must in this economy — throw in some stuff about non-state forms of helping the “lower” socio-economic classes too. I don’t know what the welfare state is going to look like in an economically chaotic America. They sure as hell aren’t going to cut corporate welfare, but I am not so sure about the “other kind”.

    Wooo! This is shaping up to be a rocking time. I get to meet you, see Darian again, meet Angela Keaton, see Starchild again, meet Black Bloke, meet Anthony Gregory, and hopefully find an interesting woman to seduce with my passion/wit for liberty…

    Remember: tell your SWOP-Chicago friends how hot and intelligent I am too ( :

  6. Aster

    I don’t support intellectual property rights, so if you wish to use any of my writings please go ahead. I would appreciate if it were made clear than I no longer identify with libertarianism.

  7. Soviet Onion

    You forgot to include me. I come from a more communalist background too. I am too vain not to mention this ( :

    So did I; used to be an anarcho-communist. Actually, I started out as someone who was vaguely sympathetic to mainstream libertarianism but could never fully embrace it due to the perceived economic implications. I eventually drifted to social anarchism thanks to someone who’s name I won’t mention, because it’s too embarrassing.

    After hanging around them for a while I realized that, for all their pretenses, most of them were really just state-socialists who wanted to abolish the State by making it smaller and calling it something else. After about a year of hanging around Libcom and the livejournal anarchist community, I encountered people who, under the aegis of “community self-management”, supported

    • smoking and alcohol bans
    • bans on currently illicit drugs
    • bans on caffeinated substances (all drugs are really just preventing you from dealing with problems, you see)
    • censorship of pornography (on feminist grounds)
    • sexual practices like BDSM (same grounds, no matter the gender of the participants or who was in what role)
    • bans on prostitution (same grounds)
    • bans on religion or public religious expression (this included atheist religions like Buddhism, which were the same thing because they were “irrational”)
    • bans on advertisement (which in this context meant any free speech with a commercial twist)
    • bans on eating meat
    • gun control (except for members of the official community-approved militia, which is in no way the same thing as a local police department)
    • mandatory work assignments (ie slavery)

    • the blatant statement, in these exact words, that “Anarchism is not individualist” on no less than twelve separate occasions over the course of seven months. Not everybody in those communities actively agreed with them, but nobody got up and seriously disputed it.

    • that if you don’t like any of these rules, you’re not free to just quit the community, draw a line around your house and choose not to obey while forfeiting any benefits. No, as long as you’re in what they say are the the boundaries (borders?) of “the community”, you’re bound to follow the rules, otherwise you have to move someplace else (“love it or leave it”, as the conservative mantra goes). You’d think for a moment that this conflicts with An-comm property conceptions because they’re effectively exercising power over land that they do not occupy, implying that they own it and making “the community” into One Big Landlord a la Hoppean feudalism :)

    So I decided that we really didn’t want the same things, and that what they wanted was really some kind of Maoist concentration commune where we all sit in a circle and publicly harass the people who aren’t conforming hard enough. No thanks, comrade.

    At the same time, I stumbled across Rod and Kevin Carson, who took me back to the question of economic implications and were like “Dude, the economic implications are totally not what you think they are”. So apparently left-libertarian outreach is getting to some people, because it got to me.

    Incidentally, I’m also a handgun owner. Unfortunately there’s no open or concealed carry in Illinois, and you can’t have them at all inside the city of Chicago itself. There’s been some talk of overturning the ban after Heller, and if that ever does happen I’m immediately going to reboot the old Pink Pistols chapter.

    Regarding dietary deprivations, I didn’t actually miss deserts so much. The first thing I ate after quitting was sushi. There are always soy based substitutes for things, which I’m kind of ambivalent about given this country’s farm policy with regard to soybeans. For those that think plant-heavy diets are inherently pleasureless, you really just have to get creative. Go east, to India and Southeast Asia.

    As for the egoistic motivation behind veganism, there are some pretty strong health benefits. They’re listed here. Or, if you’d prefer to see a pretty young woman the most gorgeous eyes ever expound on them, see this video.

    More tomorrow. Aster and Nick, I do thoroughly enjoy these conversations.

  8. Nick Manley

    I have encountered an “anarchist” proponent of the draft on a directly democratic communal level.

  9. Soviet Onion

    What the hell is my last comment doing here? I could have sworn I posted it in response your comment in the shameless Sunday section. Oh well, I’ll transpose it for the sake of continuity.

  10. Nick Manley

    This is urgent news for those concerned with the state of politics in the U.S.:

    http://c4ss.org/content/329

— 2010 —

  1. Discussed at radgeek.com

    Rad Geek People’s Daily 2010-02-08 – ALL out for the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair:

    […] be Southern Nevada A.L.L.’s third appearance at an Anarchist bookfair (after appearances at last year’s Bay Area bookfair, and this year’s Los Angeles bookfair). These bookfairs are a real blast to work: partly […]

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