14th Virtual NYC Anarchist Book Fair 2020, Sept. 25-27

We are happy to say that Kersplebedeb Leftwingbooks will be participating in the 14th Virtual NYC Anarchist Book Fair later this week — you can check out the full program here, and read the collective’s statement announcing the book fair below:

September 25, 26, 27, 2020

The NYC Anarchist Book Fair will be held virtually this year, with a few limited outdoor events. Our website will host presses, live digital conversations and workshops, prerecorded talks and roundtables, a film festival, and archival materials from previous events.

Parallel Worlds: Creating Autonomous Communities

When we construct parallel worlds (worlds guided by logic other than consumerism, accumulation, and hierarchy) we lay the groundwork for a viable anti-capitalist life, one free from police and prisons, hunger, money, and the systemic violence levelled against the physical, psychological, spiritual and communal health of all beings.

Covid-19, despite the personal and social tragedy it continues to unleash, has nonetheless opened up a potential (as well as an urgent need) to live differently. It has revealed the profound inadequacy of capitalist-white-supremacist-heteropatriarchy and has sent the governing structures into a once-in-a-generation spiral of crises. Facing a global health crisis, climate catastrophe, economic impoverishment, and relentless state violence, the Black Lives Matter movement and the formation of autonomous zones it sparked have stepped up to demand and begin to create new ways of living together outside of the oppressive systems inherited from racist, sexist, and classist colonial frameworks. We stand with them in struggle. The revolution is now—we are building the worlds we want to live in.

We invite our comrades, fellow-travelers, allies, and friends to participate in the formation of self-governing alternative systems.

We are particularly interested in hosting workshops, conversations, artworks, and films around:

• Communal Care Networks – alternatives to policing; organized communal responses to individuals and groups in crisis; organized protection of trans people, women, people of color, people with disabilities, and the neurologically divergent; meeting needs versus punishing deeds; restorative justice; anti-violence work; children’s needs; collaborative home-making
• Decolonized Futures – Indigenous movements and solidarity in North, Central, South Americas and beyond; abolishment of police and prisons; land return; free schools; curriculum for black brown queer indigenous liberation; Water Protectors; Free Borders work
• Black Liberation – demolition of racist institutions; movement histories and presents; abolition work; housing justice; education and black bodies; racism in left movements; black women, queer, and trans empowerment
• Anti-Pharma-Capitalist Medicine and Healing – self-organization of free medical care; decolonized approaches to medicine and healing; trauma’s roots in systemic oppression; herbs and herbalism; energy and body work; sex work; pharmaceutical alternatives; street medics; community medicine; protest first-aid practices and strategies
• Food Autonomy – existing projects for the growing and sharing of food; plans and practices for appropriating spaces to grow food; redistribution of warehoused/garbaged/privatized food; foraging and commoning
• Zero-Money Economies – including Mutual Aid networks; Mutual Credit Exchange systems; worker-owned collectives; off-grid urban commoning
• Resistance Organizing – BLM; General Strikes; Rent Strikes; Critical Mass; Worker Solidarity; Water Protectors and Anti-Pipeline struggles; Immigrant rights and Free Borders work; IWW; Antifa; Police Abolition; Prison Abolition; ACT-UP; Queer/Trans Liberation; Climate Justice; Earth First; CHAZ and other autonomous zones
• Anti-capitalist Media – Anarchist media collectives; open-source platforms and technologies; hacktivism; alternative internets; digital security