What's new with LBC - Fall 2019
11/03/2019
Introduction
Welcome to this quarters edition of What is new with Little Black Cart?! For those of you who are new, Little Black Cart is an experiment in anarchist publishing. We have published something like 100 titles, many historical, some important, some scandalous, and all out of our process of semi-autonomous anarchist projectuality. We print our own books (as in we have our own printshop), erratically distribute, and do what we can to make meaningful content that we share with you.
This quarter we have a couple experiments for you. The first is poetry! We have a brand new epic book of poetry, a smaller collection of anti-civilization poetry, and an interesting collection of essays by a new author (to us) Ziq (raddle).
New Titles
Semi-Automatic Poetry
A beautiful brand new book of poetry by Wolfi Landstreicher
Spanning over three decades, the magical, guerrilla wordplay of the many-masked trickster known variously as Apio Ludd/Wolf Landstreicher/Feral Faun and Apio Ludicrous restores poetry to its proper place as the insurrectionist’s shadow and emancipator of desire, and recasts the poet as a sorcerous Chaote, a lumpen Anarch and outlaw troubadour, a clown shaman and revelatory seer who senses the tidal pulse of a new epoch and becomes its herald and jester, drawing sigils for a future world of passional attraction and libertine excess. Many of the dreaming jewels contained in this collection are inlaid with feral enchantment, many are draped in Discordian insight and wit, while others challenge the docility of “political” language (and language itself), and quite a few more burst their own banks with elemental silliness. But all of these vision-intoxicated outpourings are illuminated by the blazing imaginal fire of the willful, self-creating rebel. This is poetry as an act of defiance, as the eternal enemy of Reality, as a violence against the status quo, and as a ludic zone of the imagination in which the Marvelous can alchemically materialize—making this anthology a must-read for those weary of discussing anarchy in the clichéd ways of the past.
For more information - Semi-Automatic Poetry by Wolfi et al.
Savage Eloquence
A collection of anti-civilization poetry
Reason, rationality, inductivism, and totalizing metanarratives are weapons civilization has always used to legitimize its all-encompassing predations and butchery. So perhaps it’s most useful, when critiquing civilization, to subvert the enemies’ language of pre-designed validation or abandon it entirely in favor of more primal, animistic and untamed modes of expression. Tis pocket-sized declaration of war collects a multiplicity of voices launching mythopoetic assaults on the Grand Fables and foundational “unities” of civilization—voices which deliberately aim to disturb the globalizing social code of colonization and conquest. Taken individually and collectively, their effect is to sweep aside the visionless concrete ghettoes, imaginal trailer-parks and mental urbanization of the domesticated subject—stripping away the clutter of mechanical verbalizations, the layers of conceptual plastic, the commodity-culture programming and the benumbed lifestyle of diversions that cloud our awareness to the horror of it all.
For more information - Savage Eloquence by Enemy Combatant
To the Desertmaker
The Need for a Rejection of the Colonizer’s Civilization
You have demolished their sublime mountains to construct your shopping malls and marinas. You have drained their great lakes to plant your carefully manicured golf courses. Felled their majestic forests to graze your billion cows. Desecrated their vast oceans with your rotten, putrid waste. You’re driven to control Terra, to change the course of their rivers, to reshape their shorelines and modify their lifeforms to suit your rapacious appetite. You can’t fathom of a world where you don’t own the earth below your feet; posses everything Terra created as your own. You are imperious to assume Terra will be so affected by a fleetingly short-lived and short-sighted creature as yourself. If it takes a million of your lifetimes, Terra will wash away the volumes of excrement you have soiled their surface with. You spent your wretched life desperately cutting your name into Terra’s flesh, but Terra’s wounds will callus over, creature. Long after the arrogant grin you wear on your lips has turned to dust with the rest of your foul corpse, Terra will regenerate. All the beautiful, disparate beasts you have eradicated during your brief gluttonous tantrum will be reborn. The trees will rise again in magnificent groves as far as the eye can see. Everything you took will be reclaimed
For more information - To the Desertmaker by Ziq
Recent LBC Titles & Distro Items
The 2020 Slingshot Organizer
Here to manage your dates, remind you of birthdays, and inform you of random fascinating tidbits of info and radical history. This is the large version, featuring spiral binding, allowing pages to wrap around front to back and back again.
It's bound with a tough plasticoil binding and is twice the size of the “classic” pocket organizer (5.5 inches X 8.5 inches) with twice as much space to write down all the events in your life. It is 176 pages. It has similar contents to the classic: radical dates for every day of the year, space to write your phone numbers, a contact list of radical groups around the globe, menstrual calendar, info on police repression, extra note pages, plus much more. You get a little bonus stuff in the spiral version. The covers are laminated with heavy duty 3 mil glossy plastic to help it survive the year.
A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden
Suffragette, egoist, philosopher, Dora Marsden (1882-1960) burst the chains keeping women from education; the chains keeping women from the vote; the chains of conservative feminism; the chains of philosophy, of time, and of language. Her literary and philosophical journals were among the earliest to publish James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Margaret Storm Jameson, and T.S. Eliot. She was described as the Max Stirner of feminism. From shouting down Winston Churchill, to pioneering publications, to decades in a mental hospital: this biography is the first and foremost record of her life. Over 400 pages, and includes a bibliography and an index.
Find it at A Brave and Beautiful Spirit: Dora Marsden
Insurrection Omnibus
Writings by Jean Weir, Alfredo M Bonanno, M. Passamani, and others
Insurrection was an English magazine that articulated a revolutionary perspective that largely existed at the time in Italy (1982-1989).
Capitalism contains deep contradictions which push it towards processes of adjustment and evolution aimed at avoiding the periodic crises that afflict it; but we cannot cradle ourselves waiting for these crises. When they happen they will be welcomed if they respond to the requirements for accelerating the elements of the insurrectional process. In the meantime, for our part, we are preparing ourselves and the exploited masses for insurrection. In this sense we consider the time is always ripe for the next insurrection. Better a failed insurrection than a hundred vacillations that cause the failure of a hundred occasions from which it might have been possible for the final revolution to break out. We are therefore against those who say that the recent defeat of the revolutionary movement should make us reflect and conclude that we should be more prudent. We consider that the time for insurrection has come precisely because it is always time to fight, whereas procrastinating is useful only for capital. To prepare for insurrection means to prepare the subjective conditions (personal and material) which consent a specifc anarchist minority to create the indispensable circumstances for the development of the insurrectional process. Although insurrection is a mass phenomenon, and would risk aborting immediately if it were not. Its beginning is always the result of the action of a decided minority, a handful of brave ones capable of attacking the nerve centres of the partial objective to be reached. We must be very clear on this point. The tasks of the anarchist struggle against power can be extremely varied, but all—in our opinion—must be coherently directed towards preparing the insurrection.
In this insurrectionary spirit we publish this omnibus edition (everything short of 30 year old, time-sensitive reportbacks).
For the creation of indispensable circumstances!
Find it Insurrection Omnibus
The Spectacle of Society
Stories and reviews selected from The Anvil Review
Writings by critila, rocinante, dot matrix, frere dupont, Alejandro de Acosta, Aragorn!, and others both stoned and unstoned. Part two of a three book series of the best pieces from The Anvil. The first is reviews by Alex Gorrion (The Totality is Incomplete); this book, selections specifically talking about pop culture, and the third book (yet to be released) on more intentionally political content. The Spectacle of Society includes pieces on Kanye West, Sons of Anarchy, Žižek, the Earl Brothers, Lady Gaga, David Bowie, Thomas Ligotti (from before he was a name in anarchist circles), Yukio Mishima, and many more.
Find it The Spectacle of Society
Xoros
Poetry, reminiscences, thoughts, from time spent in Exarchia. If you've been, here's a reminder of what it is like. If you haven't been, here's a taste. Personal, touching, insurrectionary.
Find it Xoros
Are you a writer?
Send manuscript proposals to us at info@lbc
Social Networking
Politics is the enemy of anarchy, and it knows it.
What's new with LBC - Summer 2019
07/16/2019
Welcome to "What's new with LBC" for the Summer of 2019. This spring we did a dash across the country to little effect except for a lovely evening in Lincoln, Nebraska (and a couple days learning to use a chainsaw). Yay for small college towns in the Midwest with a receptive audience! We are trying to start making some video reviews. We plan on some being done by the end of summer. We have produced a new issue of Black Seed, and hope to have issue 8 out by the end of the year--perhaps it will be organized at the Indigenous Anarchist Conference in August in Flagstaff AZ. We have three new book titles for your edification.
New Titles
Insurrection Omnibus
''Insurrection'' was a magazine that attempted to articulate a revolutionary perspective in English that largely existed only in Italian (1982 - 1989). It was the work of Jean Weir (Elephant Editions), Alfredo Bonanno, and a host of anon. In their own words...
Capitalism contains deep contradictions that push it towards processes of adjustment and evolution aimed at avoiding the periodic crises that afflict it; but we cannot cradle ourselves waiting for these crises. When they happen they will be welcomed if they respond to the requirements for accelerating the elements of the insurrectional process. In the meantime, for our part, we are preparing ourselves and the exploited masses for insurrection.
In this sense we consider the time is always ripe for the next insurrection. Better a failed insurrection than a hundred vacillations that cause the failure of a hundred occasions from which it might have been possible for the final revolution to break out. We are therefore against those who say that the recent defeat of the revolutionary movement should make us reflect and conclude that we should be more prudent. We consider that the time for insurrection has come precisely because it is always time to fight, whereas procrastinating is useful only for capital. To prepare for insurrection means to prepare the subjective conditions (personal and material) which consent a specific anarchist minority to create the indispensable circumstances for the development of the insurrectional process. Although insurrection is a mass phenomenon, and would risk aborting immediately if it were not, its beginning is always the result of the action of a decided minority, a handful of brave ones capable of attacking the nerve centres of the partial objective to be reached. We must be very clear on this point. The tasks of the anarchist struggle against power can be extremely varied, but all—in our opinion—must be coherently directed towards preparing the insurrection.
In this insurrectionary spirit we publish this omnibus edition (everything short of some 30-year-old, time-sensitive reportbacks).
For the creation of indispensable circumstances!
For more information - Insurrection Omnibus
The Spectacle of Society
Everything is Under Review
Popular culture seems to insist that each of us takes positions all the time, pro or con, yes or no, either/or. Most of these are choices between two equally stupid options. Wrap yourself in a flag, believe this or that about sex, drugs, responsibility, and fle sharing, and shut your mind. Take one side or another in difficult questions about living in a complicated world that only increases in its complexity. The constant drum of celebrity gossip, manufactured outrage, and drama that completely obfuscates important things is deafening. We are deaf.
This cacophony-induced deafness prevents us hearing the screams of the people of Northern Africa or of Rust-Belt America. It prevents us from taking our own problems seriously, or slowing down from the relentless grind of work, bills, or hearing anything outside the drone of mundanity.
But there are moments when you pause, when you exert your will onto your life for long enough to evaluate the options you are confronted with, and choose none of the above. The first time you see a fork in the road and choose a knife is the moment you realize that you have the power, and ability, to put everything under review. It is your cautious intelligence that frees you from the cacophony of simplification and allows you to begin to question.
When we are not battened down by our shitty jobs or the qualities of our limitations–inability to communicate, lack of resources,
alienation–we can come to our own conclusions. This moment, and the decision to ponder, is precious. Perhaps this is the most precious time we have in our adult lives, when we make real decisions about where ends the world (large and small) and we begin. Where we decide about the things we feel strong enough to say NO to. It is this no that drives the producers of the Anvil.
This project of review essays, at best, uses something real, something labored over and shared with the world, as a way to speak both to that labor and to something else. It could be that a review of the latest pop album addresses the depth and composition of the alienation one feels, or the soaring joy of the ephemeral moment the album demarcates.
For more information - The Spectacle of Society
Xoros
I want to resist portraying this as a coming-of-age story set in the Greek anarchist space, but it definitely is that. It is also a story of irony and naivete coming up against the cold and boring—and later thrilling and confusing—immersion into “the real world” and what a fantastic and terrifying place it is.
By the beer shop, a couple anarchists sit, dressed in all black, asking, “why did they have to come to our neighborhood?” There is political talk, talk of sex, and too many cigarettes, and of homes, lots of talk of homes. The square is home to some of the people, others came here for jobs that didn’t exist or to escape bombs, and found refuge in the bomb center. Exarchia is a bomb in the middle of Athens. Not only are there plenty of molotovs hurtling through the nights, but the area is gunpowder. Radical ideas, stories, connections, safe houses, and a ‘fuck you’ attitude combine with a complete disillusionment with the government and economic warfare being enacted plainly, a spit in the face, have made Exarchia fertile.
from This is a Piece of the Fiction
For more information - Xoros: Exploring a Time and Place in Greece
A Note About the Site:
In our continuing (if slow) process of making the website better and easier to use, we now have categories by publisher, which makes searching by publisher possible. Search functions are hard! But we're getting there. Enjoy!
Recent LBC Titles & Distro Items
- The Fight for Turtle Island The Fight for Turtle Island edited by Aragorn!: Native anarchist conversations and reflections
- BASTARD Chronicles 2018 on hyphenated anarchisms The BASTARD Chronicles 2018
- The Totality is Incomplete: Our first book of The Anvil Review reprints starring Alex Gorrion!
Enemy Combatant
https://littleblackcart.com/enemy-combatant
Enemy Combatant: unconventional explorations into anti-authoritarian thought and existence, bring to light forgotten and unknown outliers from history, anti-civilization theory, anarchism, individualism, and egoism, like Tsuji Jun, Eliphalet Kimball, and Arnulf Overland. This project promotes active creation of our realities, through humor, anti-political thought and actions, and relearning/remembering the lessons of people who live now and who have gone before us.
We feel that revolt today means insisting on enjoying life, so here is no belly-aching or belittling moral condemnation. As far as we're concerned the only organizing to do is a refining of our revolts to maximize the time, space, and pleasure we have left here together.
As we write this a mailing is being delivered to everyone on the EC mailing list explaining the new conditions for production.
Are you a writer?
Send manuscript proposals to us at info@lbc
Become an Intern
In a program that we're really happy with, LBC hosts a new intern every three months. If you are interested in becoming a close friend with LBC and being exposed to the ideas and personalities around the project and our environs, if you've been wanting time and encouragement to work on or start that awesome anarchist project you've had in mind, feel free to reach out to us at our email address for more information. We are currently looking for interns for the whole of 2020!!!
Social Networking
Politics is the enemy of anarchy, and it knows it.
What's new with LBC - Winter 2019
02/09/2019
Welcome to the quarterly newsletter of Little Black Cart. It is a little late this quarter because we were waiting on an external printer who was rather late with some bad news. We distribute anarchist anti-political books, pamphlets, and newspapers. This quarter we have a new book that we are rather proud of (it was put together by Aragorn!) and the annual BASTARD conference journal.
We also are growing our selection of zines with some titles from the "insurrectionary pack." This year (2019) we are slowing down but focusing on high quality anarchist content with some surprises in store. For those of you who do the whole podcast thing we have added a third to our list of frequent audio content.
- The Brilliant - a podcast of anarchist theory
- The Anews Podcast - a podcast of weekly anarchist news
- Anarchy Bang - a call in show of anarchist discussion and commentary
Check them all in but the weekly live show is a lot of fun (with live chat of nearly 50)
New Titles
The Fight for Turtle Island
This book is a culmination of several years of interviews between Aragorn! and a variety of Native people who are or were in anarchist circles. Mostly the conversations are in and about the intersections of, and tensions between, indigeneity and anarchism, through stories and experiences with anarchists.
Turtle Island is the land beneath our feet and it is the imaginary place that existed before colonization and that will exist when colonization is over. It is a true myth and an impossible dream. The fight for it requires warriors, tricksters, and medicine stronger than we know. How will we learn? Who will we do it with? Can anarchists help or are they just hurting this fight?
As a place that doesn't exist (but did) Turtle Island is the type of no place usually referred to as myth. Perhaps this is true, perhaps Turtle Island is merely the fantastic story of a people who have since disappeared, or the story I'd prefer to tell about the place I live. If I live in Turtle Island and not The United States of America, I can differentiate between my life and the life violently imposed upon me. I might be powerless to do much about it but it somehow feels important to assert that I would if I could, not an end-of-the-movie inspirational assertion about how We Are Powerful Together, but a personal declaration that I am on the side of a myth vs Manifest Destiny, that I believe in something-like-struggle if not the particulars of a specific fight, that I walk on the back of turtles and not on a spinning globe that'll be discarded as soon as the powerful are ready to leave.
For more information - The Fight for Turtle Island edited by Aragorn!
BASTARD Chronicles 2018
The Chronicles for 2018, later this year because the conference was later, but here it is! The theme was Hyphenated Anarchisms, and included herein are pieces from all of the five workshops, including two pieces by joint presenters Daniel and Jason McQuinn. Workshop titles were Can Anarchism be Saved?, Anarchism with and without Adjectives, Anarchism in a Futureless World, Notes Toward an Anarchist Numerology, and fragments from Lew's workshop on Freake Anarchism.
For more information -
The BASTARD Chronicles 2018
Insurrectionary Pack
This year we tried to do a xmas sale. It was cute. It was an effort. It was a failure financially. But since we wanted to do so much more we put a pack of titles together and wrapped them up with an aesthetic flourish.
The Delirious Momentum of the Revolt
A.G. Schwartz produced the book We are an Image from the Future, one of two good books on the 2008 insurrections in Greece. These essays provide an international insurrectionary perspective of events in the U.S. in that same time period. “The Logic of Not Demanding”, the Greek insurrection in 2008 and lessons that can be learned from it, and discussions of various attempts to try insurrectionary approaches in the United States. Schwartz is writing mostly under different names now, but continues to be thought-provoking, considered, and intelligent.
For more information - The Delirious Momentum of the Revolt
At Daggers Drawn
This is a classic of Italian insurrectionary anarchy, written and known well before insurrection was a gleam in the eye of americans.
On the one hand there is the existent, with its habits and certainties. And of certainty, that social poison, one can die. On the other hand there is insurrection, the unknown bursting into the life of all. The possible beginning of an exaggerated practice of freedom.
For more information - At Daggers Drawn
Armed Joy
Along with At Daggers Drawn, this is a classic of insurrectionary anarchism, by the single writer who has done the most to explain and explore the Italian insurrectionary perspective (with many thanks to Jean Weir and to Wolfi Landstreicher for the translating efforts they have both put in over the years!).
In Italy it seemed essential to prevent the many actions carried out against the men and structures of power by comrades every day from being drawn into the planned logic of an armed party such as the Red Brigades. That is the spirit of this book. To show how a practice of liberation and destruction can come forth from a joyful logic of struggle, not a mortifying, schematic rigidity within the pre-established canons of a directing group.
For more information - Armed Joy
A Project of Liberation
A collection of insurrectionary essays from unnamed individuals north of the border. Includes February, 2003, Activist Practice and Revolutionary Struggle, Towards An Insurgent Social Movement in Vancouver, Anarchists, Base Organizations and Intermediate Struggles, The Woodwards Squat, Social Struggle, Social War, An Anarchist Concept of Value, and Revolutionary Initiative.
Inspiring, and more current than most of the other good insurrectionary writings.
For more information - A Project of Liberation
Recent LBC Titles & Distro Items
The Totality is Incomplete
Alex Gorrion will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to The Anvil, which was (and still is, in a lingering fashion) primarily a journal of anarchist reviews of non-anarchist culture. Alex has done some of the most fun, exciting, interesting, and personal writing on that site, like a more accessible frere dupont. Alex is one of my favorite anarchist writers, and I wish for more writing by them, but until then, here are Alex's favorites from that site, collected for your reading pleasure, far away from the glowing screen. These articles include thoughtful and critical responses to Tiqqun texts; popular music icons like Jewel and Kanye (yes, I did just put them in the same sentence); thoughts on brilliant anarchists like Novatore and Isabelle Eberhardt (anarchist in spirit, if not in name), and so much more.
Stirner - The Unique and Its Property
From the translator's introduction:
I made this translation for those who rebel against all that is held sacred, against every society, every collectivity, every ideology, every abstraction that various authorities, institutions, or even other individuals try to impose on them as a "higher power," for those who know how to loot from a book like this, to take from it those conceptual tools and weapons that they can use in their own defiant, laughing, mocking self-creation, to rise up above and against the impositions of the mass. In other words I did this translation for those who know how to treat a book not as a sacred text to either be followed or hermeneutically dissected, but as an armory or a toolbox from which to take whatever will aid them in creating their lives, their enjoyments
This new version of Wolfi's translation includes an index and a gorgeous cover that refutes expectations.
- Relations Without End - Animism
- Last Act of the Circus Animals - Sean Swain, Travis Washington, Anarchist Animal Farm
- Toward an Army of Ghosts
- The second volume by Tom Nom@d on insurgent strategy
Internship
We have a living space (and good company) in Berkeley California to offer someone who wants to intern with us and work on exciting anarchist projects for three months starting in Spring 2019. Contact us at our primary email for more information and logistics.
Live the anarchy. Attack!
The rest
Want to help?
Are you in the Bay Area and would you like to help make LBC projects happen? Drop us a line.
Are you a writer?
Send manuscript proposals to us at info@lbc
Become an Intern
In a program that we're really happy with, LBC hosts a new intern every three months. If you are interested in becoming a close friend with LBC and being exposed to the ideas and personalities around the project and our environs, if you've been wanting time and encouragement to work on or start that awesome anarchist project you've had in mind, feel free to reach out to us at our email address for more information. We are currently looking for interns for the whole of 2019!!!
Social Networking
Politics is the enemy of anarchy, and it knows it.
What's new with LBC - November 2018
11/13/2018
Little Black Cart - November Update!
Other than the smoke this is a great time of year. California doesn't really have four full seasons but part of the year we choose to wear hoodies and part of the year we
need to wear them. Welcome Fall!
New Title
The Totality is Incomplete - by Alex Gorrion
Alex Gorrion will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to The Anvil, which was (and still is, in a lingering fashion) primarily a journal of anarchist reviews of non-anarchist culture. Alex has done some of the most fun, exciting, interesting, and personal writing on that site, like a more accessible frere dupont. Alex is one of my favorite anarchist writers, and I wish for more writing by them, but until then, here are Alex's favorites from that site, collected for your reading pleasure, far away from the glowing screen. These articles include thoughtful and critical responses to Tiqqun texts; popular music icons like Jewel and Kanye (yes, I did just put them in the same sentence); thoughts on brilliant anarchists like Novatore and Isabelle Eberhardt (anarchist in spirit, if not in name), and so much more.
For more information - A Full and Fighting Heart: Writings by Paul Z Simons
Sad News! We will not be in Seattle
One of our favorite bookfairs has decided to not let us table this year. #sad
Here is their only communication with us about it (they haven't responded to requests for more information)
Dear LBC:
After significant discussion, the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair 2018 collective has decided that we are not open to LBC tabling at this year’s bookfair. This decision was made in light of serious, long-standing concerns raised by many individuals about a multitude of behaviors, patterns, and decisions by members of LBC that have caused substantial harm to anarchist comrades across a wide range of locations.
We thus are unable to allow LBC to table at the 2018 Seattle Anarchist Book Fair.
Thank you for your understanding.
LBC SABF Contest 2018
In light of having nowhere to go this weekend we'd like to curate a contest! Alongside our friends at Anokchan and Anarchy Planet IRC we'd like to make some memes about Behaviors, Patterns, and Decisions (see letter to LBC in last section). Use the hash tag #SABF. The winner will win a $50 gift certificate to Little Black Cart.
- Make a meme (make sure to tag it with SABF)
- Post it to http://anokchan.org (use anon/anon or create an account) or another imageboard or platform if you so desire
- Email us with URL!
- Go to https://irc.anarchyplanet.org/ to brag about your cleverness
- Go to this page to see the competition
BTW here is an example meme. It isn't funny (we prefer funny!) but demonstrates the idea.
The Year of Clearing 2019
A lot of things are changing in anarchyland. Ex-anarchists rose over $65,000 to start a communist magazine at the same time anarchist projects keep shrinking and disappearing. What gives?
In 2019 LBC is going to host a moderated discussion, with a new theme every month, on http://sorbet.littleblackcart.com. We intend to use this discussion to build a guide for contemporary anarchists and we intend to participate in it. We will discuss topics such as identity politics, what is the future of North American Anarchism, and of course antifa.
Become an Intern
In a program that we're really happy with, LBC hosts a new intern every three months. If you are interested in becoming a close friend with LBC and being exposed to the ideas and personalities around the project and our environs, if you've been wanting time and encouragement to work on, or start, that awesome anarchist project you've had in mind, feel free to reach out to us at our email address for more information. We are currently looking for interns for Q2 and Q3 in 2019!
Social Networking
Politics is the enemy of anarchy, and it knows it.
What's new with LBC - Summer 2018
10/23/2018
Welcome to the quarterly newsletter of Little Black Cart. We distribute anarchist anti-political books, pamphlets, and newspapers. This quarter we have a few new small books (including a classic reprint) and a large memorial collection from our friend and comrade Paul Z Simons.
We also are growing our selection of ephemera with a new T-Shirt, a new Black Seed, and some shifting plans about how we do what we do. We want to inflict anarchy upon the world and want to apply energy toward these aims, with you, and to ignore the dumb shit and the haters.
New Titles
A Full and Fighting Heart
Paul Simons was one of our favorite people. This memorial to Paul Z Simons begins with four remembrances, ours; a piece by his eldest daughter, Nina; one by his partner at the time of his death, Lili, and finally a political genealogy by Jason McQuinn, long-term partner and publisher with Paul, through CAL Press.
This selection of texts by Paul is nowhere near comprehensive. It includes all his major work after Black Eye including writing in Anarchy: A journal of desire armed, Modern Slavery, his writing as El Errante and his various essays critical and triumphant.
Most of the texts in this collection are also available at the URL https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/paul-z-simons. We miss Paul now and always, authentic bridges are few and far, and his enthusiasm (with its obligatory opposite, deep sadness) and commitment to ideas and people and learning, are far too rare
For more information - A Full and Fighting Heart: Writings by Paul Z Simons
The Manifesto of the Happily Unemployed
A booklet by Guillaume Paoli (and a group of unnamed others), who also wrote Demotivational Training, and who has been thinking and writing about work for decades, in France, London, and Germany.
This manifesto has been around in German for years, and made a big splash among people, which got even bigger when it was falsely reported as being "a movement of 150,000 members." Paoli is charming, and charmingly modest, and this is, like Demotivational, a worthy addition to the books that challenge the primacy of work-to-survive/work-to-thrive, a challenge that only get sharper in these days of much conversation and experimentation with UBI.
For more information - The Manifesto of the Happily Unemployed
The Right to be Greedy
This book was originally written in 1974 by For Ourselves, a Bay Area post-situationist group at the time. From Bob Black's preface from the Loompanics edition...
Egoism in its narrowest sense is a tautology, not a tactic. Adolescents of all ages who triumphantly trumpet that "everyone is selfish," as if they'd made a factual discovery about the world, only show that they literally don't know what they're talking about. Practical egoism must be something more, it must tell the egoist something useful about himself and other selves which will make a difference in his life (and, as it happens, theirs). My want, needs, desires, whims – call them what you will – extend the ego, which is my-self purposively acting, out where the other selves await me. If I deal with them, as the economists say, "at arm's length," I can't get as close as I need to for so much of what I want. At any rate, no "spook," no ideology is going to get in my way. Do you have ideas, or do ideas have you?
For more information - The Right to be Greedy
Black Seed #6
One of the reasons we do what we do is to have the capacity to fund projects that we want to see happen and wouldn't be possible other wise. Black Seed is a Green Anarchist publication. This is the second issue under the new, second collective group. This issue we are attempting to argue more for the kind of anarchism we'd like to see and do less of the back-and-forth bickering that has been filling too much of anarchyland since the Internet.
Fuck the Internet even though it's the main way we find you (and you find us).
For more information - Black Seed #6 (single issue)
Recent LBC Titles & Distro Items
Stirner
From the translator's introduction:
I made this translation for those who rebel against all that is held sacred, against every society, every collectivity, every ideology, every abstraction that various authorities, institutions, or even other individuals try to impose on them as a "higher power," for those who know how to loot from a book like this, to take from it those conceptual tools and weapons that they can use in their own defiant, laughing, mocking self-creation, to rise up above and against the impositions of the mass. In other words I did this translation for those who know how to treat a book not as a sacred text to either be followed or hermeneutically dissected, but as an armory or a toolbox from which to take whatever will aid them in creating their lives, their enjoyments
This new version of Wolfi's translation includes an index and a gorgeous cover that refutes expectations.
- Corrosive Consciousness - A blistering attack against the ideology of Anarcho-Primitivism
- Relations Without End - Animism
- In Search of the Masterless Men of Newfoundland - Is escaping civilization possible?
- BASTARD Chronicles 2017 - Evil. Pro or Con?
- /Atassa #2 - The controversy continues. To what end?
- Brethren of the Coast - Pirates of Somalia
- Last Act of the Circus Animals - Sean Swain, Travis Washington, Anarchist Animal Farm
- Toward an Army of Ghosts
- The second volume by Tom Nom@d on insurgent strategy - Anarchist Speculations - The writings of John Moore
New LBC Shirt
Introducing the new LBC t-shirt. Enjoy!
More information? New LBC T-Shirt
The rest
Want to help?
Are you in the Bay Area and would you like to help make LBC projects happen? Drop us a line.
Are you a writer?
Send manuscript proposals to us at info@lbc
Become an Intern
In a program that we're really happy with, LBC hosts a new intern every three months. If you are interested in becoming a close friend with LBC and being exposed to the ideas and personalities around the project and our environs, if you've been wanting time and encouragement to work on or start that awesome anarchist project you've had in mind, feel free to reach out to us at our email address for more information. We are currently looking for interns for the whole of 2019!!!
Social Networking
Politics is the enemy of anarchy, and it knows it.
What's new with LBC - Spring 2018
04/21/2018
A story can be told about anarchist classic books. They shouldn't be a thing and yet they are. They are the bread book or possibly Mutual Aid, The ABCs, and the outlier The Unique and Its Property (formerly called The Ego and his Own). While I think all of these classics should be read they haven't exactly stood the test of time. Mostly these are books about the past, about before the Spanish Civil War.
At times LBC may seem dismissive of the glorious past of anarchism. We don't exactly feel dismissive, though. We honor it as it part of a story we share with other dreamers and outcasts, but consider the historicization of anarchism to be a conscious political act enacted by people today, right now. This has frozen anarchism as something from and in a former time, not allowing it to live and breathe in a contemporary world. We'd like our project, the project of anarchy, to live, breathe, and die here and now! Our anarchy reflects modern concerns rather than being a way to evaluate modern life through the articulation of 19th century concerns.
Practically, this means our project is less historical than others. We have published plenty of historical material, but mostly it has been about lives we relate to, rather than learned, "history-making" sweeps like the ones that Avrich and Ackelsberg have done so well. For better and for worse, LBC is more about theory and philosophy.
Our book for this quarter reflects this bias. It is the new translation by Wolfi Landstreicher of Max Stirner's (aka JS) The Unique and its Property. Because this is a book of ideas, particularly ideas shared by some of our closest friends, we decided that we wanted to do a bit more than usual for its launch.
One: We outsourced the production of the book. As many of you may know we have an in-house printshop where we make most of our books, pamphlets, and whatnot. This gives us a great deal of control of the what, whens, and hows but limits us regarding paper types, cover stock, etc. It makes sense when our production runs are low (which they mostly are, running into a couple hundred only). To put it more bluntly, our books mostly feel hand-crafted because they are. For a title like The Unique this wasn't appropriate.
Two: During the rest of April and May we are doing a series of interviews with known egoists on the history of these ideas, how they have impacted the world, and the lives of the interviewees. They will be hosted at The Brilliant and we'll announce them as they are posted. The first one will be with Wolfi Landstreicher, in which we discuss learning German, the motivation for the translation, and many specific details about the making of this translation.
Three: earlier I mentioned The Unique in the context of anarchist classics. The Unique is an outlier to that list (or the even longer list one would usually make of anarchist classics) in that it isn't a dusty tome from the past. Especially with the new translation, it transverses its 19th century origin as a piece of philosophy that is as relevant (if not more) than it was in 1844. This is a classic that stands the test of time because the problems and questions it raises are bigger than the particulars of how people are oppressed in a particular time. It's more about how we have done most of the oppressing to ourselves. It is also notable that it is not explicitly an anarchist text but one in which anarchism is the result of what is being proposed, not the goal itself.
It presents us with the challenge of how to stop doing that to ourselves (and others). How does one make everything their own? I'm not sure there is one answer but there is a undercurrent of people trying, which can be found in strange places. The clearest example of how up-to-the-minute (and strange) The Unique has become are the dozens of Facebook meme groups that range from as silly as just-calling-everything-in-the-world-a-spook to deep and complex conversations about what racialism looks like today. It can be found in the petty-crime-that-is-illegalism-today and that has brought joy and a type of freedom to many thousands of people. It can be found in all the modern echoes of the same efforts that were taken in the 19th century, failed then, fail today, but that can easily be mistaken for human life... because they are.
As a last note--
The wikipedia article on the book isn't terrible.
New Titles
The Unique and Its Property
Johann Kaspar Schmidt (aka Max Stirner) wrote this trailblazing political text in 1845. It is a statement that the individual is the measure of all things and establishes the foundation that existentialism, egoism, and nihilism are built on. Every group, every collectivity, demands collaboration with a set of rules and expectation, with a morality. Stirner provokes us to acknowledge our own capacity, as well as the capacities of those around us.
Previously only available in English through a translation from 1907 (which tragically titled the book The Ego and his Own)--a translation that removed some of the biting humor and occasional crudities that make Stirner more fun to read--this translation by Wolfi Landstreicher corrects that, updates the language in general, and removes the confusion involved with using terms that have changed in meaning in the intervening years.
From the translators introduction:
I made this translation for those who rebel against all that is held sacred, against every society, every collectivity, every ideology, every abstraction that various authorities, institutions, or even other individuals try to impose on them as a "higher power," for those who know how to loot from a book like this, to take from it those conceptual tools and weapons that they can use in their own defiant, laughing, mocking self-creation, to rise up above and against the impositions of the mass. In other words I did this translation for those who know how to treat a book not as a sacred text to either be followed or hermeneutically dissected, but as an armory or a toolbox from which to take whatever will aid them in creating their lives, their enjoyments
This new version of Wolfi's translation includes an index (indices are good, we want more!) and a gorgeous cover that refutes many of the expected associations with this book.
For more information -
The Unique and Its Property
Scoundrel History and Utopian Method
This pamphlet brings an article written by someone calling themselves "Le Libertaire," presumed to be Louise Michel, and recently translated by John Tresch.
An older anarchist who was famous among her friends for having played hookey to go meet Emma Goldman, and who was loath to acknowledge any heroes at all, as anarchists are not about idolizing others, did once acknowledge with chagrin that Louise Michel was in fact her hero. We're happy to offer this pamphlet of resistance from another time of repression and sadness.
I was moved by an emotion of shock and recognition at once. Some part of me had already realized that I was not in the presence of a great man, but rather a great woman--no wizened brother of the struggle, but a sister. Instantly I felt myself uncannily at home, safe at last in a place I'd never been--truly at home, perhaps, for the first time in my life. This hero, epitome of the courage and intelligence the world saw as masculine, was a woman like myself.
For more information -
Scoundrel History and Utopian Method
Caught in the Net
This is an article from Return Fire #4, discussing from a multi-discipline perspective, the concerns about the already-overwhelming and still growing influence that electronics have in our lives.
For more information -
Caught in the Net
Relations without End
Two pieces, an interview with Ben Morea, and Aragorn!'s article "Nihilist Animism."
There is a painful and enormous gap between being (or naming yourself) an animist and feeling the glory of the profane (and holy) things around you. It is filled with mono-culture religions, civilization, and technocracy. This trinity makes compelling claims that the holy holy is in fact achievable by ritual, law, and blinking lights. Monotheism makes these claims with the promise of personal salvation and the potential of private revelation. It an enormous leap to say that kneeling alone by the bank of a river and being cleansed by the sacred is pure, unadulterated animism. It may be a true moment (especially to someone enveloped in spectacle and lies) but it is not a complete one. At some point one packs up the REI equipment in their Subaru and drives back home. Sometime later one posts about it on their Tumblr. One is not complete in the moment, but instead is an observer of one's own life, a life that can feel like a series of real moments, with disconnections that feel like a problem that can be solved after retirement or whatever.
For more information -
Relations Without End
Enemy Combatant
Our good friends at Enemy Combatant (EC) have been busy the past few months. Alongside their vigorous pamphlet publication has been the publication of two new DIY titles that are exciting and new!
Corrosive Consciousness
This piece is an attempt at collecting and refining ideas I have thought about and discussed, perhaps excessively, for the past few years on the podcasts Free Radical Radio and The Brilliant, presented here in a redigested and regurgitated form that I envision, tentatively, as my final statements on the subject matter. Critique, in my view, is always implicitly complimentary: its mere existence validates the importance of its target, regardless of how harsh it might be... Anarcho-Primitivism drew me to anarchism in a way that the Humanist Left-wing or Right-wing versions never could have, and so I've lavished it with a good deal of this praise. Barring a sea change in the discourse with the Anarcho-Primitivists, what follows is a sincerely fond farewell.
For those who have listened to him or read his words, Bellamy is an unusually articulate and sincere thinker. We welcome this pretty book from Enemy Combatants, which presents Bellamy's long-awaited long essay on some of the issues with the philosophical underpinnings of the most well known anarcho-primitivists in the u.s.
For more information -
Corrosive Consciousness
Tsuji Jun: Japanese Dadaist, Anarchist, Philosopher, Monk
This is a collection of brief writings about Tsuji Jun, by Erana Jae Taylor. It includes a brief biography, background and context, and the relationship of his thinking to people like Nietzsche and Stirner.
The fertile interdisciplinary nature of Tsuji's interests is part of what makes him such a fascinating topic, and this breadth lends itself to any number of angles for study. Surely this is a contributing factor as to why so many Japanese have chosen to write about him, each wanting to tell Tsuji's story from their own angle. As a result we find titles ranging from Nihilist: the thought and life of Tsuji Jun; Love for Tsuji Jun ( a lover's memoir); Nomad Dadaist Tsuji Jun; Madman Tsuji Jun: Shakuhachi Flute, the sound of the universe, and the sea of Dada; and Tsuji Jun: Art and Pathology, among others.
For more information -
Relations Without End
Recent LBC Titles & Distro Items
- In Search of the Masterless Men of Newfoundland - Is escaping civilization possible?
- BASTARD Chronicles 2017 - Evil. Pro or Con?
- /Atassa #2 - The controversy continues. To what end?
- Brethren of the Coast - Pirates of Somalia
- Last Act of the Circus Animals - Sean Swain, Travis Washington, Anarchist Animal Farm
- Toward an Army of Ghosts
- The second volume by Tom Nom@d on insurgent strategy - Anarchist Speculations - The writings of John Moore
The rest
Want to help?
Are you in the Bay Area and would you like to help make LBC projects happen? Drop us a line.
Are you a writer?
Send manuscript proposals to us at info@lbc
Social Networking
Politics is the enemy of anarchy, and it knows it.
What's new with LBC - Winter 2018
01/10/2018
Welcome to the quarterly newsletter of Little Black Cart. We distribute anarchist anti-political books, pamphlets, and newspapers. This quarter we have a few new issues of ongoing journals and a new booklet by Ron Sakolsky and Seaweed. We are setting the stage for exciting new developments in 2018 and hope to clear our palates from the unsavory tastes of 2017. Begone! we say to the obsession with wrong headedness and headlines. Huzzah! we say to a focus on an anarchist life, projects, and friends.
Little Black Cart continues on with spirit and energy toward these aims, with you, and against dumb shit.
New Titles
In Search of the Masterless Men of Newfoundland
This title is comprised of two essays on the topic of the possibly mythical, definitely legendary, Society of the Masterless Men, a group of escapees from conscription, in the mid-1700s. This small book includes a new essay by Sakolsky, a modified reprint of a piece by Seaweed (originally published in his collection Land and Freedom), and an introduction by Sakolsky. This booklet could easily be seen as another chapter in the excellent and seminal book, Gone to Croatan.
For more information -
In Search of the Masterless Men of Newfoundland
The BASTARD Chronicles 2017
The fourth in the chronicles of the adventures of anarchist theory in the bay area. The theme in 2017 was evil, for reasons that will probably only suffer for being explained, but certainly are associated with the forced simplification of complicated realities; the polarization of thinking and acting; a general tendency toward even more us-versus-them attitudes than normal (which is saying a lot), and purges, witch hunts, etc. Presenters had different takes on why evil, what evil, and how evil, from an embrace of what is reviled to a questioning of revilement in general, to exploring specific practices that deserve more attention and analysis.
For more information -
BASTARD Chronicles 2017
Atassa #2
Not necessarily the most controversial thing LBC has ever published, but certainly the publication that has caused the most furor so far. This journal gives a platform to non-anarchist, ex-anarchist, and a-anarchist, eco-extremist thought, not limited to, but including, some people who defend killing people. While neither of the two issues of this journal include communiques from the folks who claim to have done such killings, there is some sympathy with, and also some not-necessarily-sympathetic analysis of, the phenomenon, which apparently is extremely dangerous. So, we have all been warned.
This issue does not include any direct responses to the brouhaha in certain circles about the first issue, but there is a lot of what could be considered indirect reaction, including most significantly the heart of this issue--an indepth look at christianity: how deeply it has been instilled even in groups that consider themselves atheist, and what some of its underbelly has included historically.
Some would argue that eco-extremism is one of the few lines of thinking that takes seriously the idea that we are all complicit in our slavery, that we all have choices to make every moment of every day about how and if to resist.
For more information -
/Atassa #2
Recent LBC Titles & Distro Items
- Brethren of the Coast - Pirates of Somalia
- Last Act of the Circus Animals - Sean Swain, Travis Washington, Anarchist Animal Farm
- Toward an Army of Ghosts - The second volume by Tom Nom@d on insurgent strategy
- Single Copy of Black Seed - Contemporary Green Anarchist paper
- An Inquiry into the Causes and Nature of the Misery of People - By Jean-Pierre Voyer
- The Wandering of Humanity - By Jacques Camatte
- Anarchist Speculations - The writings of John Moore
- Atassa: Readings in eco-extremism
The rest
Become an Intern
In a program that we're really happy with, LBC hosts a new intern every three months. If you are interested in becoming a close friend with LBC and being exposed to the ideas and personalities around the project and our environs, if you've been wanting time and encouragement to work on or start that awesome anarchist project you've had in mind, feel free to reach out to us at
our email address for more information.
We are currently looking for an intern for the Summer and Fall of 2018. !!!
LBC Years in Review 2017
Feel free to download the
2017 LBC Review for your amusement, edification, and to learn some of what we've been thinking during the past few years.
The LBC Catalog
Not that you'd ever deign to use it but the LBC Catalog is available as a PDF. We tend to only print these things for special events but we get it, we read in the bathroom too!
Want to help?
Are you in the Bay Area and would you like to help make LBC projects happen? Drop us a line.
(Never) Submit!
Send manuscript proposals to us at info@lbc
Social Networking
Here is the feed for anarchist news
Politics is the enemy of anarchy, and it knows it.