This year the 20th Book Fair will take place in Ghent! For the first time, we are calling it the Anarchist Book Fair (formerly (A)lternative Book Fair). As icing on the cake, this festive edition lasts two days.

Why organise a book fair?

We want to celebrate the paper in our hands, far away from the digital nightmare that creeps into our most intimate circles. At the book fair, in addition to books, you will find plenty of other publications, brochures, pamphlets, posters and stickers. From old novels and revolutionary classics, to philosophy and poetry to contemporary social criticism or the latest calls to struggle: they start from the will to radically change the world. They share ideas and seek to deepen them. Ideas, not marketable, likeable, brave opinions without stakes.

Continue reading Anarchist Book Fair 4th and 5th of May. ( Ghent, Belgium ) →

Thursday, 28 March 7PM
Anarchist Perspectives on National Liberation

Much of the ideology of ‘National Liberation’ is ugly to us. It tends to
crush rebellious individuals back into the role of soldiers and
suffocate the expansion of the social war of the exploited against
everything which oppresses them: a war which can never be between armies. Usually, there is the more or less disguised will to establish a new state, which we know will always mean handing the keys of the prison to new guards, exchanging one set of torturers for another. Recent history provides enough examples of masked militants opportunistically trading in their AK47 for the judge’s robes, politicians suit, boss’s pocket-watch, and policeman’s baton.

But at least equally as ugly is the ‘safety’ of the peace administered
in the high walls of the European power – which affords us westerners, fattened on the consumables extracted and produced by ‘post-revolutionary’ cheap labour, a sneering cynicism and complacency as regards the struggles which still come from outside and below. Among the remaining ‘revolutionary groups’ in Europe there is often an absurd process of arranging these struggles from a distance into ‘revolutionary’ or ‘reactionary’ camps, as part of what is no more than an intellectual exercise, with no skin in the game at all.

Anarchy is intolerant of both these alternatives. With all the stakes,
to criticise and attack power however it changes to remain the same, to strengthen the self-organising tension anywhere it emerges in the heat of struggle, to play our own game of subversion without hesitation: these are guiding stars. But the route out of the blackmails set by power to that radical and creative outside cannot be entrusted to spontaneous revelation. By then it is always too late. This is why the question demands serious analysis and vigorous discussion among comrades in the present tense.

Touchpaper Anarchist Library
385 Queens Road SE14 5HD