Anarchist bookfairs are not what they seem

frfr it was litty af
Musings in lieu of a reportback

Treacherous paths lead to the bookfair. One distro couldn’t come because their van broke down, another managed to make it on time despite getting a flat tire on the way there, one attendee walked and hitchhiked all the way from California. One attendee slept on a bench the night before, others struggled to book a cheap hotel in an expensive city, now rife with the potential for fugitive encounters with anarchists. Outside, sunny summer days, the skies were clear. At the venue of the rendezvous, not a fash or cop in sight, the coast was clear.

The 2023 Seattle Anarchist Book Fair was explicitly, unambiguously, and unabashedly anarchist, yet still nonsectarian. Strange bedfellows sat across from nihilist friends. Complicit looks were exchanged between tablers, while sussing out the tension with asides muttered under their breath, lips rendered illegible by facemasks. This literary feast hadn’t been celebrated since before the Pandemic. They say hunger is the best spice. Starving attendees devoured the offerings, wiping the tables clean, gushing with appreciation for the tablers.

Do not be deceived.
Its substance is not what’s on paper.
See past the nominal expectations.

Beyond the facade of a pay-what-you-want market... Beyond the surface of zines and books you may have already read years ago, which can be found online, and the conferences based on them, itemized on the bookfair program, along with protocolary policy notes... Beyond anarchism as a literary genre... Beyond the fog of ideas, and the shadow of truth and doubt...

Anarchist bookfairs are a front and a pretext for tapping into a magical wellspring of energy. A ritual of spiritual regeneration and reproduction, stoking the flames of anarchy and rejoicing in their warmth.

Because of all they put into their offering, giving it their all, organizers (always a thankless job) and tablers may feel burnout. Yet they still got out of it valuable feedback from attendees, readers, and correspondents they got to meet in the flesh, who expressed their loving gratitude effusively. Hundreds of anarchists came out of it reinvigorated, energized, pregnant with ideas, encouraged, and emboldened.

The incredulous among ye, scoffing and dismissing this as trite fluff, may visit to attest what’s here written. If they go and find not the Fountain of Youth here described, either they’re lying, or they’re spoiled and desensitized to such wonders, and should venture onward to find bigger and better things.

An anarchist bookfair is not the site of an event, it’s a crossroads where fellow travelers may join or split on their way to exciting new adventures, or keep each other company while relishing the small quotidian moments that make up a good life.

To all the anarchists who showed up: Thank you for being there, my undying gratitude for your existence.
To all the anarchist no-shows: I exhort you to go to an anarchist bookfair or gathering. There’s always the next one.

PS. Notes for the very curious & the terminally vicarious

“I’m not going there to die. I’m going to find out if I’m really alive.”- Spike Spiegel

This is the first anarchist bookfair I have gone to, which definitely colors my first impression, but I’m not a doe-eyed novice to anarchism. I’ve corresponded with anarchist friends for years, been around long enough to grow jaded, cynical, and callous, becoming dismissive of such gatherings from afar. This year, instead of rejecting the invitation, I took a chance. After years of hibernating as an online hermit, it was time to touch grass. I arrived early, carpooling along with some of the tablers I was digitally acquainted with, and I helped unload and set up some things. This is the first time I met them in person. So much could’ve gone wrong, but everything went right. Due to this, my priority was spending time with them, not picking up zines or attending conferences and workshops, but I still went to a few.

The first workshop of the first day (11:30am-1pm), imparted by the distro Ungrateful Hyenas, was titled “Caught in the Net: Breaking Free from the Digital Enclosure” based on the Return Fire article of the same name, and it followed along the lines of their zine “Beyond the Screen, the Stars”.

Description from the bookfair program:

“In anarchist circles in the US, critiques of the role that technology plays in our relationships and struggles have fallen out of style; the presence of phones and use of social media in spaces of struggle is largely taken for granted. The immense violence, death, and devastation to the earth that is required to bring phones and computers into our hands has become grotesquely normalized as our ability to interrogate our own dependency on and attachment to these technologies has eroded.

This presentation will look at the process of technological advancement and how it functions on the individual, relational, and societal levels, and the impact this has on struggles against domination. By diving into how technology impacts the quality of our lives and struggles, as well as the dangers it poses to our networks in terms of security, we’ll attempt to break out of the artificial constraints that prevent us from putting this world into question. After, we’ll have a group discussion along the same themes.”

It was held at the Studio space in the second floor; it was a cozy space that had a leopard print couch, a piano, a few guitars (one electric in a case, one 6-string acoustic on a stand, and one 12-string acoustic on a stand) a stacks of amps and speaker cabinets, and a wheelchair elevator. We sat in chairs in a circle. Most people were masked. At one point one of the people that worked for the venue brought in a fan with an air filter. Before it started, we were told not to bring our cellphones along with us. Once it started we were told that this was not a security precaution, but a ritual to habituate ourselves to not having it around, and to change the dynamic for those who are used to constantly peek at their screens at all times. A short prompt was read and then we were split into 5 person groups for a 30min discussion guided by 4 questions printed on a handout, which flew by very quickly. Afterwards there was a closing discussion with the whole group of attendees together.

From my shitty notes, themes & ideas discussed during this workshop:

-targeted surveillance of yesteryear (phone tapping landlines, for example) vs omnipresent surveillance (everyone has a smartphone, cameras everywhere with facial recognition, on buildings, on vehicles)
-challenging cultural norms around tech
-imagining a world without compulsory technological encumbrances
“does the hamster know there is a world outside the hamster wheel?”
-avoiding blaming users too much vs those who profit
-avoiding dismissing opposition to disruptive and encroaching technologies as fringe (like saying all 5g antenna burners are Q Anon)
-avoiding dismissing the tension with tech as inter-generational drama, blaming boomers or zoomers
-when talking to others, non-anarchists: tap into shared distrust of new tech. people feel bad when they spend a lot of time on their phones, tap into how relatable the bad feelings are, somatic. talk about how bad it makes you feel instead of pushing the radical primitivist angle
-tech development and deployment, and norms and impositions around them, it’s getting faster. Like what was seen during quarantine, remote work and virtual everything.
-instead of shaming people or oneself for using tech, posi approach of “who do I get to be when I put this away”
-when being offline, sitting with the discomfort, with FOMO, with feelings of grief, processing that
-there was one young person who had stopped carrying their phone and left it at home at all times
-learning to navigate the world without a phone, without a gps, without search engines

Before we left we were told there were 2 zines people could pick up, one of which was in exchange for a donation going toward Boris’ wheelchair.

I left through the back stairs and exited behind the curtains of the stage at the main space where most tables were, a space that had a sign stating its maximum capacity was for 331 people. It was packed, but the tables occupied a lot of space, which meant that at any given moment, the number of people there (in constant circulation coming In-N-Out, like the t-shirts sold by Emergent Goods, which were a hit) could’ve been around a third of that, but I didn’t care to count. I spent some time chatting with Printed by Bugs, which was tabling zines and t-shirts with the ni.hil.ist logo (at an IRL bookfair table for the first time!) for which you could offer anything from $6,666 all the way up to $0, before going to the next conference.

The second conference of the day (1:30pm – 3pm) was held in the Conference Room, a small room that reminded me of a computer classroom, but it had a long conference table in the middle, and a projection screen. It had a sign saying that the maximum capacity was for 26 people, but once the room was full, there were probably around 18 or 20, most sitting down, but some were standing in the back. Before the conference started, one of the venue’s employee came in to turn on the fan of the air filter that was propped up on a table in the back. A lady then said that she would leave since she wouldn’t be able to hear from the back with the fan on.

The title of this conference was “The Elusive Serpent” about the mythological origins and trajectories of Leviathan and it was imparted by 1/2 of Contagion Press.

Description from the bookfair program:

“It is something of a puzzle that Hobbes chose Leviathan, a monstrous sea-dragon and God’s great enemy, as the image of his beloved State in his famous 1650 masterpiece of statecraft. Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, for example, expressed dismay that the symbol was so monstrous, not to mention so Jewish. And Fredy Perlman made use of the horrifying image to level his great attack on the State in “Against His-story, Against Leviathan!”

But when we trace this figure back before Hobbes, the story only gets weirder. In this talk we will follow the twisted path of the great serpent, mainly through the anarchist and Jewish mystical traditions, with some brief forays into influential mythologies. The picture of the Leviathan that will emerge is highly paradoxical. Leviathan seems to change form, from anarchy to order and back to anarchy. Perhaps this might help us past some anarchist impasses.”

This was a very heady talk in which a lot was compacted into a short format, it was drawn from the work-in-progress of a longer upcoming written piece. Familiar myths and unfamiliar names of familiar characters and their transformations, permutations, distortions. Ethical and metaphysical implications. There was a lot here to chew on, how these myths and our interpretations affect our actions and worldviews, how we’re implicated in these myths and how we shape them.

From my shitty notes, themes & ideas discussed during this workshop:

-The state, Perlman hates it, Hobbes loves it and thinks it should be protected from diseases at all costs. -The state is formed by magic pact (social contract)
people form the state because of their pride, they form an ‘artificial man’ and a ‘mortal god’
-According to Hobbes, the only way to never be afraid is to be the sovereign Hobbes quotes Job link between fear and domination
-Hobbes concerned with spirituality: people need to fear the state more than anything, people fearing hell more than the state, or wanting heaven enough to want to become martyrs, undermines the state's monopoly on fear and rewards
-Coming out of British civil war, religious schism/religious wars threatens the state.
-Hobbes thought the state should be an authority on religious matters, not allow Protestantism, individual interpretations, individual ethics. Monopoly on the interpretation of sacred scriptures, absolute ruler, no plurality.
-Throughout the presentation there are names from Christian and Jewish mythology I’m unfamiliar with: Tehom, Bereshit, Apep, among others. Satan, Lucifer, the Anti-Christ, and Behemoth were mentioned. A point about how Christianity conflated and distorted certain characters from other older myths. An attendee asked about the resemblance of Leviathan to other beasts from Greek mythology and the grimoires, but that was beyond the scope of this presentation.
-Was the serpent in Eden Leviathanic? The serpent did not endow Eve with the knowledge of what was good and bad, but Eve “knew” the fruit was good from desiring it
-A primeval Anarchy of the elements churning in the deep existing before the creation myth, creation not being ex-nihilo, a world older than the heavenly gods, creation as an act of naming and separation
-Personal ethics, telling good and bad by yourself, stemming from your own desire, decomposes the state
-Hobbes was terrified of martyrs, of public executions which created them, then hidden punishment in jails punish freedom instead of bodies

During the conference, someone from the Backwoods table had made some interesting comments, and they stayed after the conference chatting a bit with the speaker. I stayed around to listen for a bit. Some of the things discussed were how Hobbe’s theory of the state differs from Locke’s, and how Hobbes was such a scaredy-cat that he once said something like “My mother gave birth to twins, myself and fear.” We stayed around until the speaker for the Cypherphonics conference walked in, the 3rd and last time-slot of the day. By then my attention span was fried, so I decided to stay downstairs chatting with tablers.

The next day, I got late to the Chile conference because I was listening to conversation about the “Elusive Serpent” conference continued among some tablers and attendees approaching Contagion Press’ table. There’s much hype about the much longer piece that will be published in the upcoming Baedan 4. Backwoods tablers were mentioning some of the relevant themes found in Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. which they had read and enjoyed recently, particularly of Lucifer’s encounter with Chaos. They also mentioned how Hobbes was one of the settlers in the Bermuda colony. The conversation was good, but I decided to go up to the Chile conference. Maybe I could manage to go to 2/3 possible conferences like the day before?

This was the only conference during the first time-slot (11:30am – 1pm) which covered the events and the aftermath of the “Estallido Social”, the uprisings that unfolded since October 1 of 2019. It was titled “Chile: From Victorious Chaos to Failed Constitution.” The person imparting it was there to witness some of these events. There was video footage playing alongside a slideshow simultaneously, projected on the walls of the Conference Room. The conference followed along the lines of every CrimethInc. article you ever read about the topic, which are up to their standard journalistic thoroughness.

Description from the bookfair program:

A slideshow with videos and images of the 6 months of revolt in Chile that led to the country’s recently failed constitutional convention. When student anti-fare hike protests led to a weekend of looting, burning, and martial law, people all over Chile rose up to stop the return of the kind of military authoritarianism that ruled the country throughout the 1970s and 80s. For nearly a month, a majority of Santiago and much of the rest of Chile was governed by a patchwork of horizontal assemblies focusing on what its participants could do in their neighborhoods with what they had. When the government caved in and conceded to one of the countless demands circulating in the streets–a new constitution–these assemblies, focused on the immediate here and now, were gradually replaced with conversations about what they could get someday from a government in the future. The constitutional process was the first step to taking power out of people’s hands and reconstituting the state. This presentation will show images of what real people’s power looks like in action, as well as reflect on valuable lessons from a brief window into a world where solidarity, dignity, and idealism came before profit, productivity, and order.

From my shitty notes, things discussed during this workshop:

-some people looted stores, but didn’t burn or break them so that the owners of the building didn’t get any insurance money
-the government cut the power off to some neighborhoods as a counterinsurgency measure
-parents with vivid memory of all who were disappeared during their youth, family and friends, feared for the safety of their children who were out protesting, but also understood the urgency of not letting a military dictatorship come back into power
-a week in, there was already a demand for a new constitution
-riot dogs were part of society, not property of anyone. They were well-fed and well taken care of. University students had a council to take care of the one’s that stayed in the campus. Fash took down one of the statues in memory of one of these dogs.
-a LOT of people were permanently blinded by cops
-left and right joined to appease demands: reducing taxes, firing whole cabinet, not raising the bus/metro fare. The people didn’t stop protesting, but it changed the character of the protests.
-lefty student politician Boric proposed further criminalizing masking up, looting, and barricades
-politicians everywhere were heckled and harassed, not given respite. a lady politician was not allowed to leave her apartment, but they allowed her to order food.
-all across the country, neighborhoods gathered in self-governed assemblies to sort their affairs, “the economy” was halted, they were their own little world. Gradually they shifted to be more like “town halls” making demands of the state, instead of self-organizing direct action.
-elementary school students broke out of school en masse and then went to other schools to break other students out.
-sentiment “I prefer chaos to this bullshit reality.”
-The most the far right could manage to get across at this point were liberal sounding clamoring for peaceful protest and national unity across differences.
-After 1 month of uprisings, a convention for a new constitution was approved, followed by 5 months of protests until happened.
-2020, Covid arrived, martial law, and electoralism fizzled the protests, revolt ends.
-2022: 63% reject new constitution, lefty student president Boric won elections. His campaign made people identify with the state in a way that gave more fuel to the right. Before, during the uprising, people had the notion that they could get what they wanted through transgression and defiance, which was then funneled into electoralism.
-A brief mention of Francisco Solar and Mónica Caballero, who were made example of by government in media spectacle.
-After all that, at this point the presenter says “Everything I told you is a lie!”, a refreshing disclaimer that should be used more often everywhere, including CrimethInc. articles.
-My appreciation for the presenter was attenuated when they felt the need to quote Lenin “years in which nothing happens vs years in which decades happen”. They said they were “not a fan” and that they liked him more when he was not in power.
-2 fundamental anarchist practices: reclamation of time and space. The days were counted in fire (calendar marking which days they saw fire in the streets). There was a march every day. The revolt was urgent. The economy could not function. Good luck trying to go to work. People were dancing in the streets. Spirits and ghosts from the past came back for revenge, appeared in murals everywhere. The Mapuche were never conquered, statues of colonizers were toppled and stomped on the ground. Students threw desks from 2, 3, 4 stories high to cancel the day of a big test. Similarly, cars were pushed and flipped out through the showcase windows of a car dealership. Get rekt!
- “Post-Chile” sentiment: upside down flag, people turning their backs to the flag during the national anthem and covering one eye to represent those who were blinded during the protests. Entire schools did this during graduations. Kids everywhere where trolling cops in the streets.
-burning churches (yay!), squatting places, graffiti in solidarity with Greek anarchists, the ZAD, Hong Kong protests, connecting struggles, mapping another world not limited by national boundaries.
-An attendee asked/commented if Boric was not more of a centrist than a leftist given the repression he pushed forward. The speaker clarified that repression didn’t make him any less of a leftist, since leftist governments everywhere have also been know to carry out repression against dissidence.
-1/4 of all Walmarts were looted or burnt.
-An attendee asked about police street tactics and whether they were using regular munitions and shooting to kill. The speaker said that they were using less lethal ammunition (rubber bullets, tear gas cans) which still killed some people, and others died from getting run over or beat up by cops. Cops also used water cannons mounted on trucks, which could also shoot tear gas.
-The day the police officer’s church got burnt, they ran out of ammo defending it, and they picked up slingshots from the ground, left by protesters, and started shooting with them at people, another way in which people lost an eye due to cops.
-people torched the city hall in a town where the socialist party was in power
-An attendee asked the speaker for music recommendations from Chile. Apparently there was even protest K-Pop? As we exited the conference, I handed them a note with “Sailor Pünk” and “niñx debaclx”.

It always feels bizarre to revisit the lesson of how seemingly everything can be turned on its head for a short time, and then quickly swept under the rug, and away from the front of people’s mind, to return to normality, like after the 2020 uprisings in USA. While my mind had plenty to digest, my stomach was asking to be fed, so I went outside to grab something to eat. The day before, I had skipped lunch, distracted by the lively conversation. Luckily, the bookfair’s organizers had thought of everything, and they were serving tamales at a table outside (right next to Fugitive Distro’s table), which people were very grateful for. I had the vegan black bean chipotle one, there were like 5 flavors, and two sauces. They were from a nearby place and they were good. After that, I spent the rest of the day tabling nothing and nothingness to the nihilist-curious at the empty table where Printed by Bugs had been tabling (they had to leave early), while chatting with the tablers beside me, eavesdropping on their conversations with eager attendees that were perusing their wares, right across from the C4SS table.

To wrap up the event, there was a big raffle, and some lucky contestants won enough merch to start their own distro and table next year. The raffle funds were going towards covering the venue fee, which some corporate tables that had sold a lot had not contributed to by the time the bookfair was over. Regardless, there was a bit of money left for next year’s bookfair. All in all, this bookfair was pretty big, as big or bigger than this year’s Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, I was told. The impression of its vibrant atmosphere created by people’s excitement and cheery disposition still lingers in my memory days after that weekend. In my biased opinion, it was the best anarchist bookfair of all time in the history of the multiverses or, at the very least, my favorite so far.

There are 26 Comments

thanks octox, the detailed notes on the sessions you attended made me think i almost was there.

some day, at the bookfair crossroads. :)

And here I was thinking the sole purpose of anarchist bookfairs was to settle old scores.

No seriously, thank you for this Nettle.

I meant octox.

i love octox

NO, I love octox! Get in line!

love from your brit lover

ps msg me goddamit

It's not the 90s anymore where you had a vibrant zine scene driven by great minds. Indymedia, digitalization and call out culture happened. The bookfairs largely reflect the ideational downgrade of the last 20 years.

Weren't you like a toddler in the 90s? Stop pretending you're old head, you terminally online goober.

One didn't have to be around then to know that bookfairs and the milieu space in general was better. Pre-cancel/callout dynamics, the identitarian creep not being as bad back then, less digital age dumbing down. The fact is the 80s and 90s represented a relative peak of @ ideas. Now it's just shitty committee thinkers and largely derivative milieu language. Back then you actually had much greater quality of ideas and there was a greater zine scene beyond @ thought that had some pretty respectable thinkers and writers in their own right.

Anarchism/anarchy needs to recalibrate and the milieu bookfair space ain't the place for this to happen.

A bunch of "metamoderm" liberal post-academic nerds doing collective wank sessions on Zoom and then published on Youtube? That's just spectacle, dude.

There's not escaping it when it comes to historical relevance. Also, there's nothing metamodern about what I'm talking about. Not surprisingly you've misread what I wrote in the past when I brought up a particular intellectual tendency the interesting discussion spaces they had which included interest in some of these ideas. There are some metamodern things that are worth talking about but that does not mean talking the whole discourse whole sale.

The point is to bring @ thought back to salons and coffee house discussions and leave the late stage milieu(which is downstream not radically upstream) behind. Yes it will involve zoom discussions, so what. That's time time and technology. The radicals of the past used the media ecologies of their day.

ziggles the scrivener, still preaching to the exact opposite of the choir! as he has since the dawn of @news time!

"hey fellow kids, did you ever think that instead of being sexy, badass anarchists, INSTEAD we should crouch down, shyly extend our quivering tongues and ever-so-gently lick the boot? wOuLdN'T tHAT bE CoOL?"

still no ziggles.
always and forever no.
10,000,000 noes and counting.

So you're setting this mythological benchmark,,,,, 10,000,001 yeses and counting.

AaaAaah, the return of the ol' master lumpy, reverting back to his irascible cantankerous style,,,,,,,,,,classic trolling brah!

"that instead of being sexy"
NooOoo, if you increase the frequency of orgasms, your seething ressentiment will slowly diminish ;)

That is the problem, the inability of the traditionalist stuck-in-the-mud anarchists who will(ingly) adopt and act within the materialist/economic moralities and abstractions of the previous 20th Century socio-political framework. Fun and desire are religiously suppressed because WORK and PROPERTY are still the leftist goal, they lack imagination and are unable to live within the realm of an asocial ecstatic aesthetic directed towards the individualist's aspirations and desires guided by the values of reciprosity, and this is where salons and coffee house discussions come to the fore as the most pleasurable and conclusive method of establishing total irl communication between the agents of anarchy.

I realized it's rather about Moderns Vs Post-Moderns. Not sure if that "Metamodern" shit is for real, but anyways I gotta see proof that the Post-Modern period is done.

The themes, rhetoric and theory being regurgitated over and over by the ancom types is typically rooted in anything part of the Fordist era or 19th century. They got an apparent mental block in digesting whole segments of history. Kinda like those contemporary Protestant Xians completely avoiding the social movements since the Enlightement era, acting like ideology's all about their religion...

I think that newer @ thinkers going forward should try to be the new Isidore Isou. Where about at the moment where new bohemian aesthetic movements are needed. The problem with bookfairs are that they are the post-teritiary endpoint of more interesting ideas upstream. You will never get the 21st century equivalent of that in the dead end milieu space.

Thanks octox again!

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