The library has added some new books to our collection! We’ll be sharing them over the week.

First, we have Radius by Yasmin El-Rifae. @versobooks has this to say:

A haunting, intimate account of the women and men who built a feminist revolution in the middle of the Arab Spring.

In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace.

This is the story of the women and men who formed Opantish—Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment—who deployed hundreds of volunteers, scouts rescue teams, and getaway drivers to intervene in the spiraling cases of sexual violence against women protesters in the square. Organized and led by women during 2012–2013—the final, chaotic months of Egypt’s revolution—teams of volunteers fought their way into circles of men to pull the woman at the center to safety. Often, they risked assault themselves.

Journalist Yasmin El-Rifae was one of Opantish’s organizers, and this is her evocative, aching account of their work, as they raced to develop new tactics, struggled with a revolution bleeding into counter-revolution, and dealt with the long aftermath of assault and devastation. Told in a daring, hybrid narrative style drawn from years of interviews and her own, intimate experience, it is a story of overlapping circles: the circles of male attackers activists had to break through, the ways sexual violence can be circled off as “irrelevant” to political struggle, and the endless repetitive loops of living with trauma.

Introducing a powerful new voice, a writer whose searchingly beautiful, spare prose cuts to the core of a story ever more urgent and relevant: of women’s resistance when all else has failed.

#library #books #reading #Community #feminism #egypt #MiddleEast

Tuesday is the first official day to pick up books from Black Flag Library. You can browse our catalog by following the link in our bio. If you live in Portland, OR and want to check out one of our books, we’ll be resharing the steps to create a Librarika account above this post. We just ask that you reserve your book before 5 P.M. today so that we have time to get everything together.

#library #books #reading #anarchism #theory #MutualAid #Portland #PortlandOregon

Anti-fascism on it’s own is inherently not an ideology. It is a position of opposition, nothing more. The last 6 years have seen a surge in normalization of anti-fascism, which superficially is good, but without any advance of a matched ideology of liberation, anti-fascism has been utilized as an entry point for centrists and liberals to co-opt radical language without dismantling themselves from the neoliberal ideology which has paved the way for the 21st century resurgence of fascism. To call oneself an anti-fascist is to say nothing of one’s politics. Stating that you are an anti-fascist tells us nothing of the world you wish to build. We are anarchists, which means we inherently oppose all authoritarianism, including fascism, but also authoritarian communism and the American two-party system.

Being anti-fascist isn’t enough. We cannot simply rely on a defensive stance of what we are opposed to. We must embrace liberatory ideologies which guide us into an egalitarian future. Another world is possible, but only if we build it. Without that crucial piece, we will only inherit the hellscape the fascists are leaving us.

#anarchism #antifascism #communism #worldbuilding #future #equality #library #Portland

It’s exhausting reading the news about the latest exploits of Kanye West and Elon Musk, how both of them are just advancing racist viewpoints without a care in the world for who they hurt. It’s infuriating watching the trolls command such positions of power with so little real consequences. We’ve been watching this go down for years now, as the far-right has succeeded in imposing many of their talking points into mainstream public discourse. Anarchists have an immense challenge ahead of us, but it is necessary if we ever want to live in the kind of world we envision.

It isn’t enough to simply fight. Fighting is reactive, it’s something you do when you have an enemy. We must also build! We must create community with one another and develop systems outside of capitalism to meet our basic needs, and we must do all of that knowing that anything we build may just get reabsorbed into the capitalist machine (How many non-profits regurgitate anarchist language about mutual aid while simultaneously upholding the neoliberal non-profit industrial complex?). This is what is meant when anarchists talk about the three way fight between the State, the fascists, and the anarchists.

If we build nothing and only maintain a defensive (reactionary) stance, then we’re no better than the Democratic Party that has allowed itself to slide further and further to the right in an effort to defend what little ground they can. The culture war is a Cold War that is very quickly heating up. We need space to process what it means to be an anarchist. We need cultural instruments to advance our ideas. We need to stop theorizing about our world and start building it. We are losing time as the fascists continue gaining ground on the national scale.

Here’s some books that might be useful: Adrienne Marie Brown’s Emergent Strategy series; Jeremy Brecher’s Common Preservation: In a Time of Mutual Destruction; Joyful Militancy by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery; Raoul Vaneigem’s A Letter to My Children and the Children of the World to Come; Crisis & Care: Queer Activist Responses to a Global Pandemic by Adrian Shanker; Walter Mosley’s Folding the Red Into the Black: Developing a Viable Untopia for Human Survival in the 21st Century; Simon Springer’s Fuck Neoliberalism: Mutual Aid (Kroptokin’s version & Dean Spade’s); Ward Churchill’s Pacifism As Pathology; the classic Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler; Michael Albert’s Practical Utopia; Lowenthal & Norbert’s classic analysis of American fascist talking points Prophets of Deceit; Queering Anarchism by C.B. Daring; Nancy Fraser’s The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born; the many texts of Silvia Federici, Margaret Killjoy, and Naomi Klein.

We have all of these books in our library. If you live in Portland, you can access our catalog via the link in our bio. Make a free account with Librarika to reserve any of our books and borrow books IRL every Tuesday.

#library #books #reading #fascism #anarchism #utopia #farright #MutualAid #solidarity #Portland

“My favorite part about winter is when it gets dark super early and I can spend hours losing myself in a book and sipping peppermint tea.” — The Librarian.

What’s your favorite part about winter and what are you reading this time of year?

#winter #reading #books #tea #anarchism #library

A lotta folks are talking about a railroad strike in the US. This is part of a bigger wave in labor organizing and activism that began almost a year ago, and shows no signs of slowing down. Starbucks, Amazon, and Trader Joe’s have all seen a recent grassroots push to organize workers. Workers at Voodoo Donuts, Burgerville, New Seasons Market, and Afuri Ramen have launched independent union campaigns locally. Overworked nurses and teachers have gone on strike and picketed across the country.

For folks interested in learning more about the labor movement and class struggle in general, we have 17 titles in this category. We have new books like Fight Like Hell by @kimkelly, Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns, and Fighting Times by Jon Melrod who recently spoke at Powell’s Books in Portland (shout out to ILWU 5). We have biographies about people like Ben Fletcher and organizations like Jobs With Justice and historical retelling of events like the Bisbee Deportation of 1917 and @workingclasshistory.’s compendium of working class history. We also have books that discuss the theory behind class struggle, labor organizing, and our relationship to work like Overcoming Capitalism by Tom Wetzel and Breaking Things at Work by Gavin Mueller.

#workingclass #railroad #strike #library #classwar #workers #union #books #book #Portland #Anarchist

Here’s a quick how-to for checking out books:

1. Once you are a member of Black Flag Library on Librarika (see previous how-to), you can browse our catalogue. When you found a book you want to check out, click on the title and then scroll down on the new page until you see a red button that says “request.” Click “submit” on the pop-up menu. Do not worry about the dates, as the librarian will assign check-out dates once you receive your book.

2. Pickups are available every Tuesday, once in the afternoon and once in the evening. You will receive an email from Black Flag notifying you of the locations and times for pickups. These will remain consistent, unless unforeseen circumstances come up.

3. We request a one-time $5 donation (cash or Venmo) to support the acquisition and replacement of titles as necessary. This donation is voluntary, it just goes to support the ongoing project. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Additionally, there are no late fees. Members can check out up to two books at a time. You will not be able to check out new books until all overdue books are returned, but you can always request more time to finish a book.