The Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair is going to be held the weekend of March 13-14 in San Francisco at Golden Gate Park. It’s a great time; it’s also one of the largest annual Anarchist community events in North America. And I’m in the process of organizing a table for A.L.L. at the bookfair.

In addition to a great lineup of speakers, panels and workshops, the main event (this is a bookfair, after all) will be the space in main hall with dozens of vendors with tables to show off their Anarchist books and materials from 10:00am–6:00pm on Saturday, March 13 and 11:00am–5:00pm on Sunday, March 14. Among them will be us — members of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left from Vegas, California, and around the Western U.S. I’ll be there, along with fellow Anarchists from Southern Nevada ALL. We’ll have books, journals, buttons, and more from the Southern Nevada ALL Distro available for sale as fundraisers, along with a lot of free pamphlets, smaller pieces to give away, and information about ALL as an organization and what we do back in our hometowns.

This will 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 because the bookfair a great opportunity to make connections with fellow Anarchists and to get the good word out about individualist anarchism, market anarchism, mutualism, counter-economics, to an audience of engaged radicals and movement anarchists. And also because, for a dispersed, Internet-coordinated network like the A.L.L., working the bookfair table is great opportunity to posse up with ALLies from many different towns, meet folks you’ve only known online, have some great conversations, and work together on some practical counter-economic outreach. (It’s also a good opportunity for local organizing on the ground — since we can put out a sign-up sheet and get contacts for people who are interested in ALLiance in the Bay Area.)

Anyway. If all this sounds like something you’re down with, interested in, excited by, here’s three things you can do:

1. If you’re in the Bay Area, or will be around March 13-14, drop on by the table and say hi and see what we’re doing.

2. If you’ll be there and you’re interested in selling books or merchandise for your hometown Alliance of the Libertarian Left local — or if you’re interested in hanging out with ALLies from other towns and helping with the table — then get in touch with me to coordinate. We’ll definitely have space for you, and it’d be great to posse up.

3. If you want to help support the A.L.L. presence at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair (and other bookfairs in the future), you can help us out by covering the costs of the table and the transport. Bound Together Books just recently boosted the cost of reserving a table (last year it was $100 for both days; now it’s $150). We’re doing this on as thin a shoestring as possible. With support from y’ALL, we can make the most of these opportunities to do local organizing, make connections between our locals, and put the word out and about among our fellow Anarchists.

   Here’s the shoestring, for reference.

   ALL @ Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair 2010 shoestring budget

   Cost	Description
   $150	Table reservation (Saturday and Sunday)
   $87	Car rental for transport from Vegas (driving up Friday; returning car Monday).
   $86	Cheap hotel in Bay Area (Friday and Saturday night)
   ~$0~	Gas costs will be covered by carpooling ALLies and our allies from Vegas up to the Bookfair and to the Empowering Women of Color conference, which is being held at UC Berkeley the same weekend. Food costs will be covered through Food Not Bombs.
   $333	Total costs

Hope to see y’ALL there!

We’ll be here. Will you?

Hey y’all. I am blogging on the road from Los Angeles — here to check out the Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair (which begins in a couple hours). Also to hold down a table of our own with booklets and buttons for Southern Nevada ALL, and hopefully to posse up with several Southern California ALLies in the process. (If you’re going to be there today, feel free to give a shout-out in the comments!) But neither rain nor snow nor trips across the desert wastes will stop me from announcing the appointed hour of Shamelessness.

And you? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

• By: Charles Johnson (Southern Nevada ALL, UCIR)
• Type: Presentation / Group discussion
• Language: English
• Schedule: Sunday, Nov. 8 12:30-1:30pm (Block 4). Room 209.

This workshop will be focused on an introductory discussion of the ideas and activism of anarchism (meaning the abolition of all forms of government and opposition to all systems of domination, replacing government with peaceful social cooperation and domination with free social relationships based on mutuality and equality).

Shared Article from radgeek.com

No Borders, No State (Slideshow)

Format: ODP (OpenDoc/LibreOffice) Content warning. The presentation discusses how anarchist politics and migrant status were often explicitly linked in nationalist rhetoric & anti-immigrant legislation of the 1900s-1920s. To document the stigmatization, this presentation does include images of a couple of highly racist political cartoons that appeared in U.S. magazines in the early 20th century.

radgeek.com

I will briefly introduce the basic ideals of Anarchism, discuss the meaning of Anarchy, and clarify some common misunderstandings about Anarchy and Anarchists — why Anarchy means peace, not violence, and cooperation, not conflict. I will then discuss why Anarchists are opposed to all national boundaries, why Anarchists favor the abolition of all systems of coercive immigration control, and how we hope that autonomous communities, voluntary cooperation, and grassroots, people-powered social change can replace the violence of political borders. The talk will cover both theory and practice, including a presentation on historical and contemporary examples of anarchist work against government borders — including No Borders camps in the U.S. and Europe, and international solidarity actions such as cross-border support for the Magonista uprising in Baja California during the Mexican Revolution.

Finally, we will also discuss the interconnection of struggles, and how anarchism supports the struggle against the state and its borders as part of a multidimensional struggle for social transformation, against all forms of oppression and domination.

The purpose of the workshop is to give an overview of the ideas of anarchism and some of the ways they have been put into practice in multidimensional cross-border struggles for freedom and social justice. Although I advocate Anarchism and will present my reasons for believing in it, my main purpose is to open up a conversation, about Anarchism and also particularly about the interconnection of struggles, the role that opposition to state violence, and the effort to build grassroots alternatives, play in all of our movements (whatever we might call them), and about whether or not a world without government borders must also be a world without governments. As such, I will plan to leave as much time as possible at the end of my formal presentation for discussion amongst all the participants.

Here’s my February 10 letter to the editor of the Las Vegas Sun, which apparently will remain unpublished (by them). It’s in response to their recent story on a political tussle between the South Hills Church and some folks living by it in Green Valley, over a series of big-ass crosses that South Hills Church was planning to put up on their own property:

Editor, Las Vegas Sun:

I was saddened to read (Neighbors at odds with church over huge crosses, 2/4/2009) the Clark County government, at the behest of busybody neighbors, has forced South Hills Church to scrap plans to build three large crosses on the their own property.

The bellowing blowhard busybody brigade complains these crosses — built on land the church owns, with money freely given to the church for that purpose — would encroach upon the views from their yards. Sad as that may be, the view from your yard stops being your own private property once you start looking over another’s land.

South Hills Church’s plans to build symbols of their own faith on their own property are their own business; they’re not interfering with anybody else’s property and they’re not forcing anyone to look. Yet they get harassed in the name of politically-enforced aesthetic correctness. Neighbors and county government have no more business butting in to tell them how tall or short to make accessory structures on their own land, than they have call to make the church change the logo on their own sign, or the color they painted their walls, just to better please the neighbors’ aesthetic sensibilities.

Of course, we are informed government zoning laws require shorter crosses. No doubt; that’s exactly why government zoning is a ridiculous and petty tyranny. Such laws should be immediately and completely abolished.

Leave South Hills Church alone. What goes up on their own property is their own business.

Sincerely,
Charles W. Johnson
Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left

See also:

• Roderick Long (2004-02-04): Fist of the Beholder