Books published by AK Press

The Creative Interventions Toolkit is a practical guide to community-based interventions against interpersonal violence, a process also known as community accountability or transformative justice. Originally an online resource, it is written for everyday people - survivors, people who caused harm, and friends/family who want to help without turning to the police or government. It provides basic information about interpersonal violence; advice for survivors of violence and people who have caused harm; guides for people who want to help; a framework to confront and transform violence; and stories from people who have used community-based interventions.

Fun with a purpose. Crosswords for radicals--and everyone else.

Born from sustained organizing, and rooted in Black and women of color feminisms, disability justice, and other movements, abolition calls for an end to our reliance on imprisonment, policing and surveillance, and to imagine a safer future for our communities.Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators offers entry points to build critical and intentional bridges between educational practice and the growing movement for abolition. Designed for educators, parents, and young people, this toolkit shines a light on innovative abolitionist projects, particularly in Pre-K-12 learning contexts.Sections are dedicated to entry points into Prison Industrial Complex abolition and education; the application of the lessons and principles of abolition; and stories about growing abolition outside of school settings. Topics addressed throughout include student organizing, immigrant justice in the face of ICE, approaches to sex education, arts-based curriculum, and building abolitionist skills and thinking in lesson plans.The result of patient and urgent work, and more than five years in the making, Lessons in Liberation invites educators into the work of abolition.Contributors include Black Organizing Project, Chicago Women's Health Center, Mariame Kaba and Project NIA, Bettina L. Love, the MILPA Collective, and artists from the Justseeds Collective, among others.

Why We Fight is a collection of essays written in the midst of the largest resurgence of the far-right in fifty years, and the explosion of antifascist, antiracist, and revolutionary organizing that has risen to fight it. The essays unpack the moment we live in, confronting the apocalyptic feelings brought on by nationalism, climate collapse, and the crisis of capitalism, but also delivering the clear message that a new world is possible through the struggles communities are leveraging today. Burley reminds us what we're fighting for not simply what we're fighting against.

People who have been damaged, thrown away, marginalized, or traumatized are more capable of apprehending social patterns, precisely because they've needed to be aware and vigilant about how the world works. For too long, those who rely on long-held rights and entitlement have claimed that others are biased about the very topics on which they have expertise. Damaged Like Me is a series of essays and stories that reveal a complex social landscape. It shows how possible and vital it is to build roads to a more equitable and loving collective culture that includes body sovereignty, racial justice, gender equity/liberation, and much more. It does so by relying on the insights and approaches to knowledge production of those on the receiving end of inequity and violence, those whose ';objectivity' on issues of oppression has been consistently maligned despite their having the most to teach us.

This innovative study, explores the relevance of class as a theoretical category in our world today, arguing that leading traditions of class analysis have missed major elements of what class is and how it operates. It combines instersectional theory and materialism to show that culture, economics, ideology, and consciousness are all factors that go into making ';class' meaningful. Using a historical lens, it studies the experiences of working class peoples, from migrant farm workers in California's central valley, to the ';factory girls' of New England, and black workers in the South to explore the variety of working-class experiences. It investigates how the concepts of racial capitalism and black feminist thought, when applied to class studies and popular movements, allow us to walk and chew gum at the same timeto recognize that our movements can be diverse and particularistic as well as have elements of the universal experience shared by all workers. Ultimately, it argues that class is made up of all of us, it is of ourselves, in all our contradiction and complexity.

Oscar Wilde is remembered as a wit and a dandy, as a gay martyr, and as a brilliant writer, but his philosophical depth and political radicalism are often forgotten. Resist Everything Except Temptation locates Wilde in the tradition of left-wing anarchism, and argues that only when we take his politics seriously can we begin to understand the man, his life, and his work. Drawing from literary, historical, and biographical evidence, including archival research, the book outlines the philosophical influences and political implications of Wilde's ideas on art, sex, morality, violence, and above all, individualism. Williams raises questions about the relationships between culture and politics, between utopian aspirations and practical programs, and between individualism, group identity, and class struggle. The resulting volume represents, not merely a historical curiosity, but a contribution to current debates within political theory and a salvo in the broader culture wars.

After the (American) DREAM Act failed, many young undocumented activists understood that pinning their hopes on a piece of legislation had been a bad idea. They also saw that the DREAM Act would have fragmented communities, families, and social movements, because it designated only a subset of immigrants as worthy of assimilation (and its rewards), while others, who often lived under the same roof, would be further criminalised. Eclipse of Dreams creatively tells the stories of a new generation of young people, awakened ''Dreamers'' who see the injustice built into the American dream.

In a time of social and ecological crises, people everywhere are looking for solutions. States and capitalism, rather than providing them, only make matters worse. There''s a growing sense that we''ll have to fix this mess on our own. But how? Deciding for Ourselves, in the spirit of the Zapatistas, demonstrates that ''the impossible is possible.'' A better world through self-determination and self-governance is not only achievable, it is already happening in urban and rural communities around the world - from Mexico to Rojava, Denmark to Greece - as an implicit or explicit replacement for nations, police, and other forms of hierarchical social control. This anthology explores this ''sense of freedom in the air,'' as one piece puts it, by looking at contemporary examples of autonomous, directly democratic spaces and the real-world dilemmas they experience, all the while underscoring the egalitarian ways of life that are collectively generated in them.

Primarily known for its inspiring history of mass uprisings and revolutions, France was also, in the first years of the 20th century, the home of a vibrant, varied, and active anarchist individualist movement, which included figures like Albert Libertad, Emile Armand, Andre Lorulot, and the young Victor Serge. Sceptical about the possibility of the victory of a working-class revolution, they believed that rather than wait for that hypothetical event it was up to each individual to make his or her own revolution in their daily life in the here and now, refusing to accept any of society''s rules and constraints and insisting on the need to live in accordance with one''s values. While these writings have been given short shrift by English-language historians of French anarchism and radicalism, Down with the Law provides a wide range of voices from within this neglected movement, including a first-hand account of life among the members of the Bonnot Gang.

How history-spoken, written, visual, broadcast, and shared-has supported five centuries of indigenous Bolivian resistance.

In recent years, feminism has been at the forefront of social criticism in the United States, but the mainstream face of feminism is still typically white and often focused on gender issues to the exclusion of race, class, and almost everything else. Meanwhile, there are long and rich traditions of women-of-color-centered feminisms that acknowledge all systems of power as connected, and recognize how ending one form of violence entails the transformation of society on multiple fronts.From 2007 to 2017, a small, Los Angeles-based independent magazine called make/shift published some of the most inspiring feminist voices of the decade, articulating ideas from the grassroots and amplifying feminist voices on immigration, state violence, climate change, and other issues.Feminisms in Motion offers highlights from 10 years of make/shift magazine, providing a wide-ranging look at contemporary intersectional feminist thought and action.We are living in a moment of mounting racist violence, xenophobia, income inequality, climate displacement, and war. Intersectional feminism has been creating and pointing toward solutions to these problems for generations. Feminisms in Motion offers ideas, critique, and inspiration from diverse feminists from Los Angles, to India, to Palestine, who are pointing toward a world where all people can thrive.

In recent years, social movements have been redefining ideas of justice by exposing the social roots of crime and demanding the abolition of prisons and policing. This book provides a historical complement to such efforts, and informs the field of Critical Criminology. Anarchists like William Godwin, Peter Kropotkin, Lucy Parsons, and Emma Goldman were among the earliest modern thinkers to critique criminal justice and professional criminology. They identified the sources of social problems within structures of inequality and recognised how mainstream criminologists'' would-be solutions to social problems were themselves the causes or enablers of crime.

Filmmaker Simmons (NO!: A Rape Documentary), herself a survivor of child sexual abuse and adult rape, invites diasporic Black people to join her in transformative storytelling that envisions a world that ends child sexual abuse without relying on the criminal justice system.