Little Black Cartanti-political things and the people who distrust them

005.21.13 LBC Newsletter for May 2013

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After an exhausting March (the 8 days of anarchy was a blast this year) we are finally back in the mix and near completion on our next batch of titles.

Our April title is a reprint of Ron Sakolsky’s 2005 Creating Anarchy. First published by Fifth Estate books, this title is a dynamic collage ideas, images, and action. This edition includes two new pieces, one an abridged version of the interview with Ron in Modern Slavery #2 titled “My Life in the Academic Gulag” and is a memoir on teaching and the academy. The second is a review of more recent educational activities titled “Occupying the Citadels of the Mind” from a recent issue of Fifth Estate.

More about Creating Anarchy

Our May title is Attentat – the journal of the anarchist nihilist position. This is a journal intended to explore the collision between anarchist and nihilist ideas. For too long we have suffered the limitations of words and identities that collapse into insignificance without gaining the corresponding heft of a weapon. This seemed to be a hallmark of big ideas in the 19th and 20th century. But we recognize now that the words aren’t important in the same way anymore.

Find out more about Attentat

Elephant Editions

Our recent Elephant edition reprints include Sabaté and Propulsive Utopia. This year we are continuing our exciting pocketbook series (with the fantastic artwork of 1882)

Sabaté
By Antonio Téllez

sabate

It is necessary to understand that we cannot wait for others—not even for other comrades—to give us the sign to act, the final indication. This must come from us. Each one of us, taken individually, must find his or her own comrades and constitute small affinity groups which are the essential element for giving life to the organisation of attack that we need. Actions will come easily, as a natural consequence of the decision to act together against the common enemy. Grand words, declarations to go down in history, the great organisations of the glorious past and vast programmes for the future are all useless if the will of the individual comrade is lacking. And in this perspective Sabaté was never alone. His struggle is still continuing today.

More about Sabaté

Propulsive Utopia
By Alfred Bonano

propulsiveutopia

This is not a simple call to action. The cemeteries are full of such calls. We are talking about a project that has been studied in the laboratories of capital and is now being applied to perfection. It is aimed at gradually and painlessly turning us away from our capacity to struggle. This project is moving hand in hand with the profound restructuring of capital. Ours is not a call to voluntarism, or if you like, a cry in the wilderness. We hope it will be, even if limited and approximate, a small contribution to an understanding of the profound changes that are taking place in the world around us.

More about Propulsive Utopia

Five Recent Titles

Defacing the currency by Bob Black

Bob Black’s first book in sixteen years. A critique of Noam Chomsky as a (not) anarchist intellectual, and additional engagements with democracy, technology, anarchism, and the law.

Between Predicates, War: Thesiss on Contemporary Struggle by the Institute for Experimental Freedom

A fragmented collection of theses on our tumultuous situation. From Egypt to the US, Greece to the UK, contemporary struggle announces a revolt against government. These theses draw a line connecting the forces at play, examine their parodic language, affective practices and radically self-annihilating tactics.

Stirner’s Critics translation by Wolfi Landstreicher

Brand new translation of Stirner’s responses to his critics, translated with care by Wolfi Landstreicher, with an introduction by Jason McQuinn.

Whitherburo

That America and its way of life are ending, there is not the slightest doubt. But for what reason, and in what manner, and what can possibly come next? What happens in the gap between two worlds, when the new is only dimly glimpsed like a far shore in the night, and the old is disappearing so fast there seems to be no solid ground remaining?

Anarchist International

Fellow members of the Anarchist International, our opponent is everywhere, and we need not consider how seemingly insignificant our efforts are. As long as the chaos, mystery, and ferocity of our actions pierce directly into the heart of capitalist normality, we may consider all tactics legitimate and worthy of repetition. Authority is everywhere and thus so are we, constantly struggling to undermine it.

off04.01.13 What’s new from LBC – Spring 2013

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Welcome to the start of 2013. As many of you probably know the biggest anarchist event in the Bay Area is the 8 days of anarchy which featured books, a conference, a memorial, a picnic, and some celebration (congrats to RCA/Hot Mess)! There is so much work associated with the 8 days that it’s hard to say the year properly begins for us until we drop the last guest at the airport. It is only then that we can consider getting back to work on 2013.

So here we are, ready to begin or to at least announce what we have been up to the last three months. We have three new titles from our publishing endeavor, three new pocket books from Elephant Editions, a new issue of The Anvil (#4), and a brand new LBC Catalog (our first glossy!).

Become an accomplice

If you like what LBC is publishing consider materially supporting our project by becoming an Accomplice! You get every title that we publish (over 20 planned for 2013) and help make this project sustainable. Great idea if you live in a group house or work in an infoshop!

Become an Accomplice!

Recent LBC Books titles

Defacing the Currency

It’s been 16 long years since Bob Black’s last book. This is not because Bob has stopped writing, or even that the audience for his work has disappeared. Quite the opposite. It’s been 16 years since Anarchy After Leftism because for anarchy (beyond the left) to succeed it has had to do it without Bob Black. Bob required a time out for bad behavior and is now back with a withering critique of Noam Chomsky and clear writing about anarchism and law. The book is introduced by Aragorn! and Diogenes Laertius.

Defacing the Currency by Bob Black

Between Predicates, War

Subtitled On Contemporary Struggle this book is an essay hidden behind a collection of theses. It asks a big question “What does it mean to live” and leaves the reader with the answer they are hoping for. Queue dramatic music and thunderous applause about our insurrectionary future. This a pretty little book that says what we all know…

When something really happens, having spaces, known and lesser known, across the metropolitan network is a vital contribution… Our idle hands will be a virtue and our laborious hands will be free to work with care and play, pleasure and cruelty—to build and destroy.

Between Predicates, War by The Institute For Experimental Freedom

Stirner’s Critics

Max Stirner’s original published critics were all contem-poraries writing from within the radical literary, philosophi-cal and political milieu of Vormärz Germany… three criticisms were published soon enough following the original issuance of his text for Stirner to respond in Wigand’s Vierteljahrschriftin 1845, under the title of “Recensenten Stirner’s” (“Stirner’s Critics”).

This is the first translation of this response to critics into English. This is a must read for those interested in the ideas of Egoism.

Stirner’s Critics by Max Stirner, Introduction by Jason McQuinn, Translation by Wolf Landstriecher

New LBC Distribution Titles

  • Indomitable Hearts – translations of Luciano “Tortuga” Pitronell. New from Plain Words, check it out!
  • Cop-out: the signifigance of Aufhebengate – by SamFantoSamotnaf
  • Modern Slavery – Modern Slavery #2: Wolfi Landstreicher, notes on Raoul Vaneigem, an interview with Ron Sakolsky, and other long form essays. Edited by Jason McQuinn.
  • Alejandro de Acosta – On Play and Games: In this set of essays Alejandro De Acosta provokes one to consider all life, from its most minute dust swirls to the grand chaos of planets, a game for which we are invited to be open to as endless play.

Elephant Editions

If you haven’t heard we are in the process of bringing as much of the Elephant Editions catalog into print in North America. In 2012 we put into print a series of micro-books including Simon Radowitzky and the People’s Justice, the poverty feminism, the anarchist tension, the unwanted children of Capital, nights of rage, locked up, and incognito.

In 2013 we are going to attempt to put the pocketbooks back into print. We begin with three pocketbooks that introduce the incredible artwork of 1882.

ee_q1_2013

  1. Anarchism & Violence (Severino Di Giovanni in Argentina 1923 – 1931)
  2. Feral Revolution – by Feral Faun
  3. Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy

“Social” “Networking”

Not that we are into such things… but the outside world exists. They might even be interested in teh anarchies!

Let’s help them out. Some of our books are being reviewed and talked about. Join the conversation!

Good Reads

We also do Facebook & Twitter but we aren’t going steady or anything.

P.S. We are going to start updating WNLBC every month
PPS There are additional blogs happening at the LBC Blog if you are into reading existential angst about capitalism and ambivalence about this project.

off03.14.13 Capitalism and Health

maubu to capitalism  

As a poster of this blog I wish to question concepts of health, work, family and whatever else occurs to me, from an anarchist perspective. Perhaps I will find better ways to communicate my ideas through this blog as well as spark a deeper engagement with said ideas. I welcome comments and criticism.

It seems to me there are (not limited to) two models for ‘health’  in a capitalistic society. One: the body as a machine and two: health over fear of sickness and/or death. I really only want to address the former right now.

The first thing I want to point out is that health itself may be a concept made up under capitalism. A popular definition of health describes a state in which a person is free from illness, pain and has a general sense of well-being. This state of health is a utopic idea made up by doctors, medical companies and the recent surge of woowoo practitioners who think they can deliver you from yuck to a blinding state of cheer and health.

Well, there is no place to arrive at and there is no promise land. What there is is a series of conflicting and complicated ideas and suggestions about what to eat, how to be social, where to work, when to exercise, etc.

So, if you follow the body-as-a-machine model of health it points to an idea of the body as being something that continues to be fed, rested and cleaned so it will be able to function optimally, day in and day out. In a capitalist society anything(one) that functions efficiently is praised and encouraged to keep doing so. Capitalism works because there are bodies behind it and if these bodies are repeatedly congratulated for consistency then that encouragement makes it appear as if there is an optimal way to be/function. For capitalism, there is. For people, there is not.

The society we live in has enough serious problems to make a person sick, from limited sources of digestible minerals in food to the connection this problem (along with others) has with our emotional states. To me there is no “fix”. There is a world that doesn’t nourish human beings, but nourishes machines. So, I think people that are skeptical of this world, skeptical of something that is “everywhere and nowhere”  have reasons to question what are the possibilities of being well, or, does it even exist?  Is it really about being well or is about learning to adapt in a way that involves less compromise?

 

 

off03.12.13

stranger to Uncategorized  

The most recent brouhaha about porn and anarchist venues (sf bookfair 2013) reminds us (again) about the question of work – of jobs specifically – and about how we negotiate being anarchists in the real world.
It is my premise, not particularly controversial in some circles, that there is no such thing as an anarchist job. Anything we get paid to do has, by definition, been integrated into the system (many things we do for free have also been integrated into the system, but that’s for another day).
For a job to be anarchist it would have to negate economics, to reject market forces, to not fit into the world-as-it-is. It would have to be unable to be coopted, subverted, made into a pressure release for the system.

It might be more controversial though, to take the next step and reject even the possibility of some jobs being better on an anarchist metric than others.

Jobs that are usually acceptable to anarchists are ones that involve some combination of the following – bossless, under the table, low tech (gardening), high tech (computers), service of some sort (sex work, medical, social, educational, publishing), and/or requiring very little in the way of skills or commitment (barista).
All of that is fine, except for when people get into these idiotic arguments about whether one kind of work is more anarchist than another.
No matter how cool of a teacher you are, no matter how decentralized your network is, no matter how much you like your clients, money – specifically getting money for doing a particular thing at a particular time, feeds the status quo in multiple ways, and my argument here will be that the more subtle that relationship, perhaps the worse.
To the extent that people are able to fool themselves about how much they are part of the system, then we are distracted by more meaningful questions (like how do we tear it all down, maybe?) and are encouraged to be judge-y about things that mean nothing. Having a social work job might be more comfortable, but i know that for me it fed my racism, sexism, and statism in subtextual ways (most of my clients were, of course, women and people of color, and assistance from the state was of course one of the main goals they were striving for) – however much social work can also feed a cynicism about the state (cynicism/=anarchy). More to the point, helping people in the here and now doesn’t encourage people to attend to an awareness of how much social work (for example) is about managing discontent and putting a face on the state. The same argument can be made for teaching, for medicine, etc.

On another level, being broke can feel emotionally valid (we’re not the enemy!) but having money or not doesn’t determine the value of our theory, or even how long we will stay engaged with anarchy.
Rejecting simplistic class war analysis, the version of marxism that says that the working class is the active agent–and that has motivated so many people to act and/or be downwardly mobile–has wider ramifications than might be immediately apparent.

This argument i’m making reminds me of things i have learned about racism, in a couple of ways. One, the sense that explicit and blatant racism (a la southern u.s. racism) is preferable over subtle and covert racism (a la in the north) — because it’s better to know than to be hoodwinked. Two, that to accept that we are all racist can be a big shift in perspective, bypassing a whole level of defensiveness.

off02.28.13 On capitalism #1

stranger to capitalism  

I’m someone who works with LBC, and has been thinking a lot about things like what makes a project anarchist, and how do anarchists operate in the real world and stay consistent with their anarchist principles, and what *about* anarchists and capitalism, anyway… so me and my friend are going to be writing about this stuff, as a way to challenge ourselves and others to do more in depth thinking about what we do and how we do it.

I am tired of anarchists either judging something because it costs money (or “too much” money, whatever that means), or just throwing up their hands about the topic and saying “we have to survive!” These two polar responses are insufficient. They don’t lead to increased insight, or to better practices, so we’re going to see if we can’t manage a more interesting conversation, at the very least.

Capitalism is blah. It’s everywhere and nowhere, inescapable and meaningless, brutal and banal.

Doing stuff in this context, doing anything but especially things that make money, actual transference of funds, means confronting the repercussions of this system that fucks with us all. Capitalism isn’t, of course, money. It isn’t even having a project where you’re trying to get people to buy things (although maybe if that’s all that is going, then it is capitalist).

I think anarchists either spend too much time talking/thinking about money or too little (or both). The scene is full of reductionist stories about money exchange, as if money is synonymous with class, or class is an easy way to understand power. The scene is also full of people ignoring money (sometimes it is the same people who talk about it too much), the money that people get for professionalizing struggle, the money that infrastructure costs, the money that people need to survive (sooner or later, but always eventually, no matter how underclass and/or crusty one is).

I am arguing here (as dot put it recently) that money, as the face of a complex system, is to capitalism as police are to the state.  The state is not just the brutal (or friendly, sometimes) hand on the street. It is an entire system of enforcement and assumptions and manipulations that work to teach us that we don’t have power. Capitalism is not just the reduction of everything to numerical values, it is also the alienation of people from their labor, of people from each other, of work for survival from play, and of actions from consequences. Focusing only on the most obvious face of the system means not understanding our actual options, our actual strengths, our actual opportunities.

off01.21.13 What’s new with Little Black Cart – Winter 2013

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Anarchist publishing thrives on visible anarchist activity. The past 18 months has been an exciting time for both, which raises the question of what’s next? When we consider future titles we do it with an eye on what will inspire the next wave of activity: what informed the last wave and what were its limitations?

With this in mind we publish our newest title WhitherBuro: Applied Metaphysics, an epitaph on the grave of America. You can read the extended introduction to WhitherBuro: Applied Metaphysics here.

Become an accomplice

If you like what LBC is publishing (LBC Books, Ardent Press, Repartee, and our other imprints) then please consider materially supporting our project by becoming an Accomplice! You get every title that we publish (12 titles directly but in actuality over twice as many in 2012) and help make this project sustainable.

Become an Accomplice!

Recent LBC Books titles

WhitherBuro: Applied Metaphysics (December 2012).

Yet now we have reached the point when these three competing beliefs have revealed themselves—through their collapse (either past or, in the case of America, imminent)—to be merely progressive forms of nothingness. If all these systems share technological fascination, then the world is still in thrall to the essence of meaning-lessness. In fact with America this nothingness
has reached its most developed form. These are big assertions, yet we are ready to defend them.

Next up is Stirner’s Critics (January 2013), which includes the first and only complete English-language translation of Max Stirner’s original replies to his major critics in both “Stirner’s Critics” and “The Philosophical Reactionaries”.

(T)he self-interest of the unique, thus your self-interest, gets trampled underfoot precisely in the sacred, or human, world, and this same world, which Hess and Szeliga for example, reproach as being egoist, on the contrary has bound the egoist to the whipping post for thousands of years and fanatically sacrificed egoism to every ‘sacred’ thing that has rained down from the realm of thought and faith. We don’t live in an egoistic world, but in a world that is completely sacred down to its lowest scrap of property.

We also published Anarchist International (November 2012) a based-in-reality story about an international cabal of anarchists. A wave towards what is possible from what can often feel like total failure, from the sadness of today.

(The Intenational is) A re-occurring waveform pattern that occurs throughout linear time… We are the reincarnations of every anarchist who has ever been, and we reappear endlessly throughout time. It is vital that this is understood without reservations or restraint. To understand this basic point is to become a member of the Anarchist International. This understanding will allow you to become aware of the importance of everything you say, everything you do, and every action you undertake.

Finally, we have the complete collection of writings from Abele Rizieri Ferrari aka Renzo Novatore. Poetic, fiery, and willful playfulness. If you have seen Toward the Creative Nothing then you know the power and energy that Novatore brought to paper. Now read it all!

Our First eBook – For Free!

This is the time where reflection on recent (and past) activity (mistakes and successes) is important. In this spirit we offer the free download of our book about the influence of anarchists in the Occupy Movement Occupy Everything: Anarchists in the Occupy Movement 2009-2012. The password is oocupy (in honor of our friends from the 75 River occupation), the format is epub. The download of Occupy Everything is here.

New LBC Distribution Titles

  • Modern Slavery – Modern Slavery #2: Wolfi Landstreicher, notes on Raoul Vaneigem, an interview with Ron Sakolsky, and other long form essays. Edited by Jason McQuinn.
  • Alejandro de Acosta – On Play and Games: In this set of essays Alejandro De Acosta provokes one to consider all life, from its most minute dust swirls to the grand chaos of planets, a game for which we are invited to be open to as endless play.
  • Slingshot – 2013 Organizer: Manage your dates, remind yourself of birthdays, and inform yourself of random fascinating tidbits of info.
  • Individualists Tending Towards the Wild – The Collected Communiques: Kaczynskian-influenced communiques written by Spanish speaking actors against civilization.
  • Artnoose – Kerbloom!: best anarchist letterpress perzine EVER!
  • Ron Sakolsky (ed) – The Oystercatcher: An annual surrealist zine, filled with art, poetry, outrage, humor, and ruminations.
  • Fifth Estate – Fifth Estate #388: This issue of FE focuses on warehouses, aka prisons and schools. “Life in the Body Dump: How Prisons Warehouse Discarded Women” reviews the patriarchal role prisons play, “Three from Cleveland 4 Sentenced” discusses the agent provocateur, and the section on schools discusses how the current system degrades us and alternatives to it.

Elephant Editions

Covers

Stirner’s Critics

Whitherburo

Anarchist International

Novatore

Novatore

off10.30.12 What’s new with Little Black Cart – Fall 2012

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The first signs of winter are in the air and morale seems low. This is a perfect time to sit by a fire and read a good book or two. A time to conspire, prepare for future activities, and stay out of the cold. We have some morale boosters and some rich offerings for future conflicts.

This fall/winter promises to be filled with opportunities to meet, celebrate, and talk about the ideas and projects that inspire us. We will be present at both the Boston & Carrboro bookfairs. In addition we are participating in the first annual East Bay Anarchist Bookfair in the distant city of Oakland, CA (we are based in Berkeley, CA).

We are Little Black Cart Books & Distro

Become an Accomplice!

The vision of LBC Books is to publish books within the tension between the conflicts of today and the theory that informs them. We have an aggressive publishing schedule (at least 12 titles a year) that will continue to reflect a range of anarchist and anti-political topics including theory, criticism, history, and more. In the next six months we will publish titles that range from nihilism to anti-civilization, harsh criticism and sympathetic histories, polemics and fiction. We are calling for accomplices! We hereby invite you to join us in this adventure. For $20 a month you get everything we publish, a discount on what we carry, and our very real appreciation for supporting this project.

Check out the LBC Accomplice program

New Titles for the rest of 2012

Novatore

Renzo Novatore is the pen-name of Abele Rizieri Ferrari who was born in Arcola, Italy (a village of La Spezia) on May 12, 1890 to a poor peasant family. Unwilling to adapt to scholastic discipline, he only attended a few months of the first grade of grammar school and then left school forever. Though his father forced him to work on the farm, his strong will and thirst for knowledge led him to become a self-taught poet and philosopher. Exploring these matters outside the limits imposed by the educational system, as a youth he read Stirner, Nietzsche, Wilde, Ibsen, Baudelaire, Schopenauer and many others with a critical mind.

Renzo died on November 22 (1922), at the hands of the cops.

This is a collection of all of the known writings of Renzo Novatore, translated by Wolfi Landstreicher. It contains the fiery polemics, poetry, and willful play that readers of “Toward the Creative Nothing” are already familiar with. For those new to the writings of Renzo prepare for an emotional cavalcade of egoism, nihilism, and hatred for democratic mediocrity. To life!


Find out more at LBC

After-Post Anarchism

In After Post-Anarchism, Duane Rousselle challenges the hegemony that epistemology has enjoyed for several centuries of political and philosophical thought.

This book takes post-anarchism to its limit through a reading of the philosophy of Georges Bataille. Bataille’s philosophy allows for new ways of conceiving anarchist ethics, ones that are not predicated upon essentialist categories, foundationalist truth-claims, or the agency of the subject in the political context. An anarchist ethics–not pluralist but nihilistic–is proposed.


Find out more at LBC

Coming in November 2012

Anarchist International

We are the Anarchist International. Our existence has been kept a secret from you for over a century, although it is almost certain that you have been able to discern our actions when they have taken place.
-Anarchist International

From this promise is a wishful history made great. More powerful than the orthodox story of soldiers, priests, and facts is the story of a new International. An ad hoc Anarchist International that includes the Uncontrollables, the builders of infrastructure, and the spirit of something amazing based in what went before.

Towards infinite solidarity and the end of time

Coming in December 2012

Whitherburo

What is the WhitherBuro? And who are the Whitherpeople, and what do they want? Primarily, orientation to counter the prevailing dis-orientation. When a battle has been lost and the army is in flight, little pockets form in propitious areas to gather the survivors, to protect themselves, and to survey the extent of the disaster with open eyes. We are one such little pocket, and we have opened our eyes.

Stirner’s Critics

”Stirner’s Critics” includes the first and only complete English-language translation of Max Stirner’s original replies to his major critics in ”Stirner’s Critics” and “The Philosophical Reactionaries.” ”Stirner’s Critics” is translated by Wolfi Landstreicher and includes an introduction by Jason McQuinn.

Earlier in 2012

Anarchy 101

Anarchy 101 is an edited and crowdsourced introduction to anarchist ideas. The content comes from the website Anarchy 101 and represents the best responses from dozens of contributors to hundreds of questions about the Beautiful Idea: this thing called anarchy. This has been the fastest seller of any book we have published.


Order at LBC

Treatise on Etiquette for the Younger Generations – by Raoul Vaneigem

Order at LBC

Crime Thought – by Alden Wood

Order from LBC

Uncivilized: The best of Green Anarchy Magazine

Order from LBC

Theory of Bloom – by Tiqqun

Order from LBC

Freedom: My Dream – by Enrico Arrigoni

Order from LBC

Bookstores!

If you are part of an independent, anarchist, or interesting bookstore, then you might like to order titles from us. We now have a distinct landing page for you at LBC Bookstore Page. Check it out!

New Material From our Friends

  • SLINGSHOT 2013 – The one, the original, Slingshot Organizer! Here to manage your dates, remind you of birthdays, and inform you of random fascinating tidbits of info.
  • baeden – queer nihilist journal: Smart and provocative writing in an elegant object to hold; doesn’t get better than this…
  • Individualist Anarchism / Revolutionary Sexualism – Thirteen essays by Emile Armand (infamous individualist, nudist, iconoclast) from the new Pallaksch Press, including five new translations, two of which were translated from the French specifically for this printing.
  • Lost in the Fog and Dialogue – Initially a pamphlet, now expanded significantly by the addition of an interview of the authors by the Greek anti state communists TPTG.
  • Communicating Vessels #24 – Another issue, beautifully produced, with a rich letter section of people who thoughtfully engage with the content ( a writer’s dream!), and articles on freedom, Frederick Douglas, obituaries of Tom Rathgeber and Leonora Carrington, and a poem or two.
  • The Collected Communiques of Individualists Tending Toward the Wild – Spanish speaking Anti-civilization Kaczynskists. Do you need to hear more?
  • The Broken Teapot – A pamphlet on the weaknesses of most current anarchist scenes when it comes to how to deal with how broken we all are in relationships.
  • Expect Anything, Fear Nothing – Included here are conversations, essays, rants, and histories of the Scandinavian Situationist and pro-Situationist scene.
  • On Play and Games – In this set of essays Alejandro de Acosta provokes one to consider all life, from its most minute dust swirls to the grand chaos of planets, a game for which we are invited to be open to as endless play.

Errata

East Bay Anarchist Bookfair

We are lucky enough to live in a part of the country where there are hundreds (if not thousands) of active anarchists and dozens of interesting anarchist projects. On December 1st is the first annual East Bay Anarchist Bookfair that is going to celebrate the local space and collaborate on what the future holds. A day of conversations, a day of ideas, a day with friends.

East Bay Anarchist Bookfair

New LBC people

LBC has been growing this year. In addition to publishing (and PRINTING!) over a dozen titles this year we are adding new efforts toward video, audio, and more. LBC is a volunteer project and we have recently added more volunteers. These incredible people have moved from all over the country (PNW, midwest, and the East Coast) to join LBC. Welcome them!

Upcoming titles with LBC

  • Attentat – A bleak anarchist journal from Pistols Drawn
  • Free from Civilization – An anti-civilization manifesto by Enrico Manicardi
  • A collection of writing from Bob Black
  • More Elephant Editions titles!

We will be near you

We are…

Little Black Cart
PO Box 3920 Berkeley CA 94703

Our mission is the total transformation of society into one that is stateless and classless, a society of mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, and the liberation of desire. We call this mission anarchy, but also accept it being called anarchism, (anti-state) communism, anti-authoritarianism, or not naming it at all. This goal is not immediately forthcoming, and many of our efforts haven’t been particularly rewarding. Therefore we spend our time doing things that increase the quantity and quality of an understanding of our mission, of what we truly desire, even if we aren’t entirely sure how to directly achieve it.

We know what we want but not how to get there. In this spirit we offer a selection of things, meaningless on their own, but in a context (social, historical, genealogical) that have been meaningful for each of us. Even though we are fully aware of the contradiction of our participation in commodity culture, the spectacle, and even plain old petit-bourgeois capitalism, we maintain a resolve that this is worth doing. Why? Because the context of interacting with other inquisitive people, with each other, and with others involved in the project of social transformation, is the closest we have come to such a society.

off09.20.12 LBC Newsletter – September 2012

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We are exhausted after the exciting events of the last month, having taken LBC to Los Angeles and Seattle and had friends table for us in Victoria and Minneapolis. Thanks to our friends we are able to travel far beyond what we are physically capable of. Friends!

This month we are introducing a new imprint along with our September title. The imprint is called Repartee and will be comprised of new theory, history, and other intellectually-challenging material. The Repartee imprint will be distinguishable from other LBC Books imprints because of its simple and elegant presentation and challenging content.

We are proud to announce the publication of our friend Duane Rousselle’s book After Post-Anarchism a critique of post-anarchism. This book takes post-anarchism to its limit through a reading of the philosophy of Georges Bataille, a philosophy that allows for new ways of conceiving anarchist ethics not predicated upon essentialist categories, foundationalist truth-claims, or the agency of the subject in the political context.

Here are our five (other) most recent titles

Anarchy 101 – Anarchy 101 – This book derives from the website of the same name (http://anarchy101.org) and introduces the reader to a conversation about the possibilities of anarchy. Anarchy is many things to different people: a vision, a plan, a conversation, a process. It is the editor’s view that anarchy is best understood, and is most helpful, as a tension, a question, a rejection. This text operates from that premise.

Treatise on Etiquette for the Younger Generations – By Raoul Vaneigem – Vaneigem sought in his Treatise on Etiquette for the Young Generationsto elaborate the subjectively-experienced, phenomenal connections between most of these same aspects of capitalist society. Vaneigem’s innovation is the systematic description of these same developments from the other side, the side of lived subjective experience in everyday life: phenomenal descriptions of humiliation, isolation, work, commodity exchange, sacrifice, and separation he has himself undergone or suffered, which help readers interpret their own experiences similarly.

Crime Thought – by Alden Wood – This text is a collection of essays analyzing the theoretical underpinnings to CrimethInc. explicitly as a project of anarchist thought. These essays are intentionally disparate in content; the hope is that taken together they ultimately form a critical understanding and interpretation of the thematic tendencies within CrimethInc.’s particular brand of anarchist theory.

Uncivilized: The Best of Green Anarchy – edited by the Green Anarchy Collective – “Conceived from the premise that what the planet needs is fewer ‘activists’ and more warriors, Green Anarchy was essentially a journal of war—an open-ended Richter scale that charted the civilized-decay curve and chronicled the triumphs and tragedies of anarchist resistance to the World System. Very quickly, it also evolved into a fairly substantive theoretical journal, one that came to reflect the growing edge of the far frontiers of anti-political thought.” – From I Suppose It Was Worth A Shot

Theory of Bloom – by Tiqqun, trans. by Robert Hurley – The Bloom is forced to fixate on certain social roles in order to survive. Worker, housewife, professional, student, citizen, all of the roles are but masks, donned and rarely removed. The Bloom must remain positive while wearing these masks, ignoring its own power and sovereignty. “The Bloom is the masked nothing.” But underneath the mask is the pure potential of every person.

Other new material

The Broken Teapot – A pamphlet on the weaknesses of most current anarchist scenes when it comes to how to deal with how broken we all are in relationships. Based in personal experience, tackles complicated and difficult issues.

Baeden – This journal of Queer Nihilism critiques Edelman’s No Future, reintroduces Guy Hocquenhem, and engages other topics including jouissance, nothingness, revenge, and wildness.

Rolling Thunder #10 – The cover of this long absent publication includes a broken window. A. BROKEN. WINDOW!

Ker-Bloom #97 – A letter to her infant son.

My Own #5 The latest issue of egoist inspired reflections on friendship, language, and reviews.

off08.11.12 LBC Newsletter August 2012

admin to Monthly updates  

This month we bring a new process for updating people about what we are working on. We will still issue our quarterly “What’s new with LBC” that will be more broadly available (posted to the broad Internet) but for our closer friends (the thousand or so who read our blog and receive our update emails) we will send more frequent (eight times a year) updates about what we are working on.

Summer has been relatively quiet in the Bay Area. The Bay has the strange characteristic of being one of the most pleasant places to be during the summer (with a temperate climate that sticks to a median 70 degrees in the summer) but is abandoned by many of our friends who travel around the world this time of the year. As a result fall is usually when excitement fills the air.

We haven’t said this explicitly in our “What’s new” emails (although we have referred to it) but we produce our own books in our LBC print operation. We are in the middle of a large production cycle because of the FOUR anarchist book events happening around the country. If you are in any of these areas you will be able to check out our newest titles in the following places.

  1. August 25th-26th: Seattle Bookfair
  2. September 8th-9th: Victoria BC
  3. September 8th-9th: Los Angeles CA
  4. September 8th-9th: Twin Cities Bookfair

Here are our six newest titles

Anarchy 101 – based on the website of the same name (http://anarchy101.org) this is an unusual thing — An easy to read introduction to the beautiful idea for someone who is not looking for a program. This book reflects the Q&A format of the 101 site with lightly edited answers from dozens of different respondents.

Treatise on Etiquette for the Younger Generations – Our version of the woefully under-appreciated book by Raoul Vaneigem (previously titled in English as “The Revolution of Everyday Life”); our approachable version is intended to reach a broader audience. Jason McQuinn (who reprinted TRoEL in the pages of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed magazine) writes an introduction to the ideas presented in the book. Additionally, this book is a benefit for Long Term Anarchist Prisoners (http://june11.org/) Marie Mason & Eric McDavid whose stories are heart- wrenching and worth learning more about.

Crime Thought – This is a book about the anarchist publishing project Crimethinc that orients the ideas and practice within the larger scope of the anarchist project and provides several clues to the interested reader about how to go from a interest in books like “Day of War, Nights of Love”, “Work”, and “Recipes for Disaster” into an engagement with the rest of the anarchist canon.

Uncivilized: The Best of Green Anarchy – This collection of the best of Green Anarchy magazine feature the strong condemnation of our techno-fetishistic society and a yearning for an entirely different world. Civilization, Technology, the Left, Resistance, and Decolonization are topics with articles by John Zerzan, Ted Kaczynski, Aragorn!, Dan Todd, Jesus Sepulveda, Ron Sakolsky, Wolfi Landstreicher, Fire, and interviews with Ward Churchill and Godfrey Reggiou.

Theory of Bloom – This short book lays bare our social isolation and the conceptually simple (yet practically difficult) solution to it. This is a foundational text of Tiqqun’s thought (the first version originating in the Tiqqun journal #1). This version is translated by Robert Hurley.

Freedom: my dream – The autobiography of Enrico Arrigoni: an Italian anarchist who lived through the Russian Revolution, and who was an anarchist war correspondent during the Spanish Revolution, seeing first hand and reporting on the iniquities of the communists as well as the fascists during that war. Arrigoni’s character comes through every page, with humility, humor, a love of life, and a life-long dedication to egoism (a kind of anarchy that was less popular in his day than it is even today).

And here are some titles from our friends that are new

Expect Anything, Fear Nothing – The story about the Scandanavian Situationist International.

My Own – My Own #1 – #4. An egoist newsletter filled with rants, critiques, and new translations from our favorite Vagabond Intellectual.

Elephant Editions – Included the new US publication of Incognito, Locked Up, Simon Radowitzky and the People’s Justice, The Anarchist Tension, and Apart from the Obvious Exceptions.

off07.16.12 What’s new with Little Black Cart – Summer 2012

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After an exhausting Spring with visits to NYC, the Midwest, and Montreal we have settled back down to work for the summer. This summer is a great one for LBC as we are growing faster than anticipated with new people getting involved and a great increase this summer in the project. This is especially exciting because summertime can be a time of decreased energy for projects in the Bay Area. Not so this year.

Little Black Cart Books & Distro 2012

New Titles for the Summer

Anarchy 101

Coming in August 2012

Introductions to anarchist ideas, up till now, have suffered from being one-dimensional, too lengthy, or too sectarian. The history, practice, and philosophy of anarchy has suffered for this lack. We haven’t encouraged new generations to approach our ideas other than on mostly sectarian terms.

Anarchy 101 is an edited crowd-sourced introduction to anarchist ideas. The content comes from the website Anarchy 101 and represents the best responses from dozens of contributors to hundreds of questions about the Beautiful Idea: this thing called anarchy.


Preorder at LBC

Treatise on Etiquette for the Younger Generations

Coming in July 2012

Raoul Vaneigem’s Treatise on Etiquette for the Young Generations represents a refusal of representation and bureaucracy, along with the emphasis on autonomous desire, play and festivity. This book reflects the anarchistic impulse of the Situationist International and the events of May 1968.

This edition will continue to make this important title accessible to a new “Young Generation”, as well as offering a new introduction from Jason McQuinn (publisher of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, which serialized the English translation) and an affordable price.

The moment of revolt, which means now, is hallowing out for us in the hard rock of our daily lives, days that miraculously retain the delicious colours and the dreamlike charm which – like an Aladdin’s cave, magical and prismatic in an atmosphere all its own – is inalienably ours. The moment of revolt is childhood rediscovered, time put to everyone’s use, the dissolution of the market, and the beginning of generalised self-management.


Order at LBC

Crime Thought

CrimethInc. has been the most accessible introduction to anarchist ideas in the past 50 years. They have also been accused of being ahistorical, lifestylist, subcultural, and more.

It cannot be denied that CrimethInc. has succeeded, far more than any other anarchist publisher, in putting books into the hands of people. The unfortunate corollary is that once those people read CrimethInc. texts, they don’t generally get involved in other anarchist activities. The tens of thousands of books from CrimethInc. haven’t resulted in tens of thousands of autonomous agents striking out against the existing order. Crime Thought attempts to examine this failure by placing the ideas of CrimethInc. within the broader anarchist and intellectual context that they arise out of. Through this Crime Thought provides a gateway from CrimethInc. to a broad and sustainable anarchist intellectual space that is also a space for attack.


Order at LBC

Uncivilized: The best of Green Anarchy Magazine

A collection of some of the best that Green Anarchy had to offer (not including When Animals Attack–look for that later!), in thematic sections that echo the humor, the aesthetic, and the sensibility of the magazine that for years was the most consequential voice in the northwest.

Civilization, Technology, the Left, Resistance, and Decolonization are some of the themes, with articles by John Zerzan, Ted Kaczynski, Aragorn!, Dan Todd, Jesus Sepulveda, Ron Sakolsky, Wolfi Landstreicher, Fire, and interviews with Ward Churchill and the remarkable Godfrey Reggiou.


Order from LBC

Bookstores!

If you are part of an independent, anarchist, or interesting bookstore, then you might like to order titles from us. We now have a distinct landing page for you at LBC Bookstore Page. Check it out!

New Material From our Friends

  • Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed – Issue 72/73 Anarchy 72/73 (CAL Press)
  • Sovereign Self – The eighth and final issue of this egoist project. Sovereign Self 8
  • Communicating Vessels – #23 Breugel’s paintings, Francois Villon, Radovan Ivsic and a great Letters to the Editor section Communicating Vessels 23 (Communicating Vessels)
  • Piece Now – Peace Later: Anarchists and firearms. Piece Now (Black Powder Press)

Errata

New Ardent Press Website

One of our publishers has a newly designed website. It is pretty. Check it out at Ardent Press

Elephant Editions

For a few years we haven’t seen enough of the fantastic publishing work from Elephant Editions in the United States. We are slowly going to bring all of the excellent work that EE does to the United States. Expect to see approximately one new EE title every month. Most of these titles will be in charming pocket-sized editions with textured cover stock and cover illustrations by a local friend.

  1. Incognito – Experiences that defy idenfication More
  2. Anarchist Tension by Alfredo M. Bonanno More
  3. Locked Up by Alfredo M. Bonanno More
  4. Apart from the Obvious Exceptions by Alfredo M. Bonanno More
  5. Simon Radowitzky and the People’s Justice More

Upcoming titles with LBC

  • Renzo Novatore – A complete collection of Novatore’s work in English, including newly translated material
  • After Post-anarchism – A critical engagement, on its own terms, with post-anarchism
  • Attentat – A bleak anarchist journal from Pistols Drawn
  • Free from Civilization – A translation of an Italian anti-civilization manifesto by Enrico Manicardi

We will be near you

We are…

Little Black Cart
PO Box 3920 Berkeley CA 94703

Our mission is the total transformation of society into one that is stateless and classless, a society of mutual aid, voluntary cooperation, and the liberation of desire. We call this mission anarchy, but also accept it being called anarchism, (anti-state) communism, anti-authoritarianism, or not naming it at all. This goal is not immediately forthcoming, and many of our efforts haven’t been particularly rewarding. Therefore we spend our time doing things that increase the quantity and quality of an understanding of our mission, of what we truly desire, even if we aren’t entirely sure how to directly achieve it.

We know what we want but not how to get there. In this spirit we offer a selection of things, meaningless on their own, but in a context (social, historical, genealogical) that have been meaningful for each of us. Even though we are fully aware of contradiction of our participation in commodity culture, the spectacle, and even plain old petit-bourgeois capitalism, we maintain a resolve that this is worth doing. Why? Because the context of interacting with other inquisitive people, with each other, and with others involved in the project of social transformation, is the closest we have come to such a society.

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