Portland State University PDXScholar Book Publishing Final Research Paper English 5-2016 Anarchism in Book Publishing: An Exploration of Business and Ethics Alexis M. Woodcock Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/eng_bookpubpaper Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Publishing Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Woodcock, Alexis M., "Anarchism in Book Publishing: An Exploration of Business and Ethics" (2016). Book Publishing Final Research Paper. 13. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/eng_bookpubpaper/13 This Paper is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Book Publishing Final Research Paper by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. Anarchism in Book Publishing: An Exploration of Business and Ethics Alexis M. Woodcock Portland State University May 10, 2016 Research Question: How do anarchist publishers reconcile their businesses with their ideals? Introduction The term anarchist business may seem like an oxymoron to some. In fact, the misconception that anarchism precludes any organization at all is rampant, regardless of participation in capitalism. The fact remains that there are anarchist businesses all over, from restaurants to bookstores to record labels, engaging in capitalism while simultaneously opposing it. Publishing is an area of particular interest, with a number of explicitly anarchist presses actually thriving. How do they reconcile their businesses with their ideals? Does their work contradict their ideologies? What is anarchism? Perhaps the most useful place to start is in defining what anarchism is and isn’t. One pamphlet from See Sharp Press gives a concise summary to this end, beginning with the negations. According to the author, Chaz Bufe, anarchism is not the following: terrorism, which is rejected by most as highly unethical and impractical; primitivism, which is a separate ideology that is also rejected by most as unethical and impractical; chaos or a rejection of organization, which is a complete misconception; amoral egotism, which is a toxic ideology that often masquerades as anarchism but isn’t; or libertarianism as defined by the US political party, which has little to do with historical uses of the term. Detractors of a rigidly pacifist persuasion might contend that certain forms of direct action, especially those that damage property, qualify as terrorism, but most anarchists would likely argue that there is a distinction to be made between non-defensive violence against people and violence against inanimate objects. A 2011 article in the Guardian professes a similar negation of the common usage. According to author David Goodway, “Anarchists disdain the customary use of ‘anarchy’ to mean ‘chaos’ or ‘complete disorder.’” Similarly, section A.1.1 of infoshop.org’s Anarchist FAQ 2 includes the following pronouncement: “To state the obvious, anarchy does not mean chaos nor do anarchists seek to create chaos or disorder.” But if this common usage of the term is mistaken, what sort of ideology do anarchists actually espouse? According to the Anarchist FAQ, anarchism is “a political theory which aims to create a society within which individuals freely cooperate together as equals. As such anarchism opposes all forms of hierarchical control—be that control by the state or a capitalist—as harmful to the individual and their individuality as well as unnecessary.” L. Susan Brown writes in The Politics of Individualism, “Anarchists oppose the idea that power and domination are necessary for society, and instead advocate more co-operative, anti-hierarchical forms of social, political and economic organisation” (1993, 109). In their letters, Sacco and Vanzetti wrote that anarchists are “the radical of the radical—the black cats, the terrors of many, of all the bigots, exploiters, charlatans, fakers and oppressors. Consequently we are also the more slandered, misrepresented, misunderstood, and persecuted of all” (1928, 274). The Kate Sharpley Library has an archived page offering Stuart Christie’s definition of anarchism, including the following text: Anarchism is the movement for social justice through freedom. It is concrete, democratic and egalitarian. Anarchism promotes mutual aid, harmony and human solidarity, to achieve a free, classless society—a cooperative commonwealth. In an anarchist society, mutually respectful sovereign individuals would be organised in non-coercive relationships within naturally defined communities in which the means of production and distribution are held in common. We are well aware that a perfect society cannot be won tomorrow. However, it is the vision that provides the spur to struggle against things as they are, and for things that might be. To return to the previously cited article from the Guardian, Goodway states that anarchism signifies the absence of a ruler or rulers, a self-managed society, usually resembling the co-operative commonwealth that most socialists have traditionally 3 sought, and more highly organised than the disorganisation and chaos of the present. An anarchist society would be more ordered because the political theory of anarchism advocates organisation from the bottom up with the federation of the self-governed entities—as opposed to order being imposed from the top down upon resisting individuals or groups. He goes on to detail its history as a workers’ movement; the ideology’s first published naming as anarchism by Proudhon in his 1840 work What is Property?, in which he calls himself an anarchist and “a firm friend of order”; its diversity in the particulars of the ideology; and the perhaps growing number of what he calls “natural anarchists,” people who haven’t identified themselves with the word but “think and behave in significantly anarchist ways.” Anarchism & Capitalism Despite the emergence of “anarcho”-capitalist ideologies (the inclusion of scare quotes being the most common manner of reference), a brief study of the core tenets of anarchism as an ideology show it to be in direct opposition to capitalism. As a result, “anarcho”-capitalists are scorned by the vast majority of anarchist communities—while their anti-state leanings seem superficially to place them under the anarchist umbrella using the dictionary definition, anarchism is in fact a complex political theory that is very explicit in its opposition to all hierarchy, including those inherent in capitalism. As the Anarchist FAQ puts it in section F.1, “Opposition to government is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being an anarchist . Even a superficial glance at anarchist theory and history shows that no anarchist limited their critique of society simply at the state.” The passage goes on to point out that “anarcho”-capitalists “are not against authority, hierarchy, or the state—they simply want to privatise them.” According to the FAQ, many libertarians take on this position, this label, and some eventually take it to its logical conclusion, which is essentially that of a competitive monarchy. 4 Even using the dictionary alone to define it, breaking down the word anarchy to its base components still leaves one with a sense that hierarchy really is the crux of the matter rather than the state alone, and the theory has historically reflected that. According to Merriam-Webster, the origin of the word comes from the Latin anarchia and Greek anarchos, which both translate to “having no ruler.” A ruler most directly refers to a state figure, but anyone who holds power over another—legally, economically, or otherwise—can be said to be a type of ruler. In Chomsky on Anarchism, Noam Chomsky writes, “A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer” (2005, 123). All this being the case, how is it possible that anarchist publishers—not “anarcho”- capitalists, but truly anarchist publishers—can reconcile their businesses, their participation in capitalism, with the core values of their ideologies? Anarchist publishers There are anarchist businesses all over the world, implicitly or explicitly, and they take many forms. What they tend to have in common is the goal of embodying their ideals even while working in the undesirable framework of capitalism. They often do this by promoting mutual aid, offering safer spaces for marginalized communities, using nonhierarchical organization, and disseminating texts and resources they deem important. Though almost anyone can put together a zine, anarchist publishers are largely where the book-length texts of such ideologies come from. Two very well-known anarchist publishers in the United States are AK Press and CrimethInc. There’s also Freedom Press, in the United Kingdom; ChristieBooks, operated solely 5 by the Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie; On Our Own Authority! Publishing, in Atlanta, GA; Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, an imprint of Combustion Books; Ardent Press; Little Black Cart, in Berkeley, CA; Eberhardt Press, in Portland, OR; and Left Bank Books, in Seattle, WA. This is not an exhaustive list, and it doesn’t scratch the surface on publishers who operate on anarchist principles but don’t declare themselves as such (and one can easily understand why shying away from such