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In response to Really? (not verified) Thu, 09/12/2019 - 20:38

For the sake of argument, let's leave aside accusations of scummy personal antics; anarchism in the contemporary United States is in practice very much a fan culture and a wholly laissez faire phenom and a free-fire zone where people can do whatever they want to one another. Kanaan shouldn't be held to a higher standard than anyone else. Kanaan's cynicism and at least borderline exploitative antics are par for the course in this scene.

Let's move on to the more important question: you allege that "have provided literary interventions that have impacted a variety of social struggles in important ways." This assumes that publication endeavors Ramsey Kanaan have been associated with are fulfilling some sort of greater good in struggles for liberatory social change. Actually publication efforts that Kanaan have been involve in have an indiscriminate enthusiasm for anything and everything that left-of-center people might want to buy.

See for example the wholly uncritical attitude on display here:

"Angela Davis is one of the iconic figures of this era. She was acquitted of conspiracy charges in 1972 after one of the most famous trials in U.S. history. She went on to become an internationally regarded scholar and writer. She is the author of many books, including Women, Culture and Politics and Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. Governor Ronald Reagan of California vowed when he fired her from her position at UCLA that she would never again teach in the state system. Today, she is a tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz." (http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php/AngelaDavis)

For many decades, Angela Davis was a high-profile functionary for the Moscow-franchise "Communist" Party U.S.A. In this capacity she was a vocal and shameless apologist for one of the biggest mass incarceration and forced labor projects in human history, the so-called Soviet Union. In today's U.S. she gets taken seriously as a prison abolition activist. Not having read Davis's works i can't say that a supposedly anarchist publisher shouldn't carry them -- but if the publisher in question had any political backbone or intellectual integrity they would carry works by such a dubious source with some sort of caveat or qualifier.

This isn't a small point -- Stalinism was the vanguard of the counter-revolution in the 20th century; Stalinism delivered the planet to capital; we are now living in the accelerating negative aftermath of this. And what I'm saying about PM Press's attitude towards Davis applies across the board to other not-terribly anti-authoritarian stuff peddled by PM Press. Try to engage Kanaan about tis and watch the arrogant and petulant response that ensues. Ramsey Kanaan is not some kind of valiant radical forced to make an occasional unpleasant compromise; he is a businessman like other businessman.