2017 LBC Review

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We have a few journal projects that we produce, some of them directly. Last year we skipped the production of this review that goes over some of our thinking behind the titles we publish. So this year we wanted to cover the 24 months we missed. The result is over 200 pages of writing about our titles, and excerpts from the past twenty odd books, seven journals, and associated papers and ephemera we have published.

The crazy thing about publishing is that along with producing written material we also get to be at the center of untold numbers of dramas, usually other people's, but also about our own infamy and abomination, irrelevance and detachment, decrepitude and unhipness. This is part of the project of producing unpopular anarchist material at a time when anarchists are on the cusp of broader, real world, relevance. Even as a flood of new documentaries and media projects highlight what is easy to digest about anarchists we will continue our engagement with the ideas and problems that are central to our interest in the continuing Beautiful Idea.

As publishers, LBC was born in the same maelstrom as Occupy; our first book in 2012 was Occupy Everything and concerned that incoherent moment. As the editor, what I left out of that book was an analysis of what was ahead, especially for anarchists. Since 2012 anarchist political practice has lacked creativity. It could be said that anarchism has always been a cyclical political phenomenon, but there are, arguably, dedicated anarchist partisans who are doing the work of making the frequency shorter and the amplitude higher. This has been the functional goal of LBC, which has had marginal success. We have impacted certain conversations, not exactly as intended, nor as the situation needed, but--to our capacity--we have tried in our way to be free (nod to Cohen).

During the next five years we will be producing fewer new titles. This will give us the time to find and polish titles that are more focused on the conversations we find most timely and important. Another piece of the work that we will now have time to emphasize is finding audiences for some of the material that we have already published. since a number of our titles deserve more attention than they've received so far. We will now have time to fill in some of the spaces between the incendiary markers we've produced. Some things have changed over the past five years. Publishing books is one long-term way to be part of those changes. What are other ways? We hope to now have the time to take our experience and critique and engage in the way that social relationships (for example) have changed.

Here is the Review available as a free download