News

Historian Raymond Craib is joined by Sasha Lilley, editor of PM’s Spectre series imprint, to launch his new book, Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age in Ithaca, NY on Thursday, July 7th at 3pm ET. This event will be in-person by Buffalo Street Books, located at 215 N Cayuga St, Ithaca, NY 14850. Learn more and get the book here. Join us!

Raymond Craib is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History at Cornell University and the author of The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes, and with Barry Maxwell, co-editor of No Gods No Masters No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms.

Sasha Lilley is a writer and radio broadcaster. She’s the co-founder and host of the critically acclaimed program of radical ideas, Against the Grain. Sasha is the author of Capital and Its Discontents and Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, among other works, and is the editor of the imprint Spectre for PM Press.

Join Peter Cole on Thursday, July 7th in Göttingen, Germany to discuss Anti-racism and trade unions in the USA – past and present and his book Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly.

The event is free, in-person at Obere-Masch-Str. 10, 37073, and hosted by FAU Göttingen and the editorial staff of the journal Sozial.Geschichte Online.

Join Peter Cole discussing Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, Second Edition in Berlin on Friday, July 8th at 7pm, an in-person talk hosted by the Berlin branch of the FAU at Gruntaler Str. 24. Learn more here.

Peter Cole is a professor of history at Western Illinois University in Macomb and a research associate in the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Cole is the author of the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area and Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia. He coedited Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW. He is the founder and codirector of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project.

About Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly, Second Edition:

In the early twentieth century, when many US unions disgracefully excluded black and Asian workers, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) warmly welcomed people of color, in keeping with their emphasis on class solidarity and their bold motto: “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All!” Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly tells the story of one of the greatest heroes of the American working class.

A brilliant union organizer and a humorous orator, Benjamin Fletcher (1890–1949) was a tremendously important and well-loved African American member of the IWW during its heyday. Fletcher helped found and lead Local 8 of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union, unquestionably the most powerful interracial union of its era, taking a principled stand against all forms of xenophobia and exclusion.

For years, acclaimed historian Peter Cole has carefully researched the life of Ben Fletcher, painstakingly uncovering a stunning range of documents related to this extraordinary man. Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly is the most comprehensive look at Fletcher ever to be published. It includes a detailed biographical sketch of his life and history, reminiscences by fellow workers who knew him, a chronicle of the IWW’s impressive decade-long run on the Philadelphia waterfront in which Fletcher played a pivotal role, and nearly all of his known writings and speeches, thus giving Fletcher’s timeless voice another opportunity to inspire a new generation of workers, organizers, and agitators. This revised and expanded second edition includes new materials such as facsimile reprints of two extremely rare pamphlets on racism from the early twentieth century, more information on his prison years and personal life, additional recollections from friends, greater consideration of Fletcher from a global perspective, and much more.

James Kelman in conversation with Alan Black on Kelman’s new novel, God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena, an online discussion on Saturday, July 9th at 11am PT, 2pm ET, 7pm Glasgow, hosted by City Lights Books. Learn more and register here.

“A true original … A real artist … it’s now very difficult to see which of his peers can seriously be ranked alongside [Kelman] without ironic eyebrows being raised.”
—Irvine Welsh, Guardian

Reading with Marcus Colasurdo for Simultaneous Revolutions: (Poems)

In-person reading. Open mic to follow.

Saturday, July 9, 2022, 6-9pm

Corbin Studio & Gallery

4 E. Main Street, Crisfield, MD

Tuesday, July 12th, 7:00pm – 8:30pm ET, hosted by Firestorm Books.

The Crisis of Capitalist Rule

William I. Robinson joins for this virtual event in conversation with professor Hilbourne A. Watson to discuss the release of Robinson’s new book, Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic. Register here.

Global Civil War provides a big-picture account of how the coronavirus pandemic and new digital technologies have drastically transformed capitalism and the entire global economy and society. Analyzing the concentration of power and control in the hands of corporate conglomerates, tech giants, megabanks, and the military-industrial complex, the book documents the extent of unprecedented global inequalities as the mass of humanity faces violent dispossession and uncertain survival.

William I. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Among his many books are Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014); Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism (2018); and The Global Police State (2020).

Hilbourne A. Watson is Professor Emeritus, Department of International Relations, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. His publications include Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period, The Caribbean in the Global Political Economy and Globalization, Sovereignty and Citizenship in the Caribbean.

Join Koni Benson in San Francisco on Wednesday, July 13th discussing women-led movements at the forefront of the struggle for land, housing, water, education, and safety in South Africa. Hosted in-person at 6:30pm by The Green Arcade located at 1680 Market Street (at Gough) San Francisco, CA 94102. Check the website for safety protocols and lean more here.

Koni Benson is the author of Crossroads: I Live Where I Like: A Graphic History, historian, organizer, and educator. She is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, where she is committed to creative approaches to history that link art, activism, and African history in her work with various student, activist, and cultural collectives in southern Africa.

About the book:

Drawn by South African political cartoonists the Trantraal brothers and Ashley Marais, Crossroads: I Live Where I Like is a graphic nonfiction history of women-led movements at the forefront of the struggle for land, housing, water, education, and safety in Cape Town over half a century. Drawing on over sixty life narratives, it tells the story of women who built and defended Crossroads, the only informal settlement that successfully resisted the apartheid bulldozers in Cape Town. The story follows women’s organized resistance from the peak of apartheid in the 1970s to ongoing struggles for decent shelter today. Importantly, this account was workshopped with contemporary housing activists and women’s collectives who chose the most urgent and ongoing themes they felt spoke to and clarified challenges against segregation, racism, violence, and patriarchy standing between the legacy of the colonial and apartheid past and a future of freedom still being fought for.

Presenting dramatic visual representations of many personalities and moments in the daily life of this township, the book presents a thoughtful and thorough chronology, using archival newspapers, posters, photography, pamphlets, and newsletters to further illustrate the significance of the struggles at Crossroads for the rest of the city and beyond. This collaboration has produced a beautiful, captivating, accessible, forgotten, and in many ways uncomfortable history of Cape Town that has yet to be acknowledged.

Crossroads: I Live Where I Like raises questions critical to the reproduction of segregation and to gender and generational dynamics of collective organizing, to ongoing anticolonial struggles and struggles for the commons, and to new approaches to social history and creative approaches to activist archives.

Cara Hoffman and Morgan Talty discuss their new books, RUIN and Night of the Living Rez, in an online event hosted by Skylight Books of Los Angeles, CA on Wednesday, July 13th at 6pm PT. Learn more and register here.

Cara Hoffman is the author of three New York Times Editors’ Choice novels; the most recent, Running, was named a Best Book of the Year by Esquire Magazine. She first received national attention in 2011 with the publication of So Much Pretty which sparked a national dialogue on violence and retribution, and was named a Best Novel of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. Her second novel, Be Safe I Love You was nominated for a Folio Prize, named one of the Five Best Modern War Novels, and awarded a Sundance Global Filmmaking Award. A MacDowell Fellow and an Edward Albee Fellow, she has lectured at Oxford University’s Rhodes Global Scholars Symposium and at the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, BOMB, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Daily Beast, and on NPR. A founding editor of the Anarchist Review of Books, and part of the Athens Workshop collective, she lives in Athens, Greece with her partner.

Communitarian Anarchism, a virtual event featuring John P. Clark, in discussion with artists Liz Lessner and Mat Keel, about the updated edition of his book The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism and their work with the project Yes We Cannibal and La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology.

Thursday, July 21st from 7:00pm – 8:30pm ET hosted by Firestorm Books of Asheville, NC. Learn more and register here.

In this stunningly original work, John P. Clark skillfully argues that a free and just social order requires a radical transformation of the modes of domination exercised through social ideology, the social imaginary, the social ethos, and social institutional structures. Ambitious in scope and compelling in its strength and imagination, The Impossible Community offers readers an accessible theoretical framework along with concrete case studies to show how contemporary anarchist practice continues a long tradition of successfully synthesizing personal and communal liberation. This provocatively innovative work will appeal not only to students of anarchism and political theory but also to activists and anyone interested in making the world a better place.

John P. Clark is a philosopher, activist, and educator. His books include The Anarchist Moment; Anarchy, Geography, Modernity; and Between Earth and Empire, and, as Max Cafard, The Surregionalist Manifesto and Other Writings, Surregional Explorations, and Lightning Storm Mind. He is director of La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology. Find his PM Press books here.

Liz Lessner is a sculptor, educator, and writer. She creates novel sensory experiences by combining traditional fabrication techniques with emerging technologies. She is closely engaged with the work of Suely Rolnik, Bernard Stiegler, and Nigel Thrift. Liz created the Sensory Engagement Laboratory in Washington DC in 2018 which has found multiple homes including online and at YWC.

Mat Keel is completing a PhD in Anthropology, Geography and Philosophy at Louisiana State University. His experimental ethnographic dissertation and accompanying film amends new ecological thought with insights drawn from the multifold emergence of theories of the psychological unconscious, race and nature. He is a practicing studio artist working with sculpture, film and text and a practicing Buddhist.