PM Press

Out of the Lab, into the Streets tells the story of how academic workers built the largest strike in the history of American higher education and set a new standard of militancy in one of the fastest growing sectors of the labor movement. In doing so, these workers also taught organizers everywhere lessons about the effectiveness of collective power cemented through worker-to-worker organizing, militant escalation strategies, and cross-union solidarity. On November 14, 2022, academic workers of the University of California began a strike that brought workers out of the lab and into the streets for six weeks to fight for more equitable working conditions. The strike was a point of arrival and a process at the same time. It was the hard-fought achievement of a short- and long-term history of union organizing and a learning practice for workers across campuses, disciplines, job classifications, political affiliations, and identities. This book documents the everyday and on-the-ground making of union organizing and power building. The nine workers who gave lengthy testimonies for this project challenge preconceptions about the advantages and difficulties of organizing in higher education. They make insightful analyses of how being active union members transformed them personally and reshaped their approach to science and education. Union organizers and other activists will find lessons and reflections on core topics for the labor movement: how to build a worker-led union, the practical meaning of democracy during mass action, dissent and unity amongst workers, and how to measure a fight''s success. Within these nuanced accounts of militant organizing, everyone will find inspiration to keep collective power alive and keep fighting for a better future.

Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International, fomenter of the May 1968 revolt in France, and author of The Society of the Spectacle, was also the creator of six tantalizingly inaccessible films. Technically and aesthetically, these films are among the most brilliantly innovative works in the history of the cinema. But they are not so much “works of art” as carefully calculated subversive provocations.Following the still-unsolved Mafia-style assassination of the films’ financer and producer in 1984, all the films were withdrawn from circulation for nearly twenty years. One of the films is an adaptation of Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle. Others evoke his adventures in the bohemian underworld of 1950s Paris, which he contrasts with the increasingly ignorant, ugly, and alienated world that has since been produced by modern capitalism. In each case Debord simultaneously attacks the film medium itself, challenging spectators to create their own adventures instead of passively consuming the pseudo-adventures that are presented to them.Ken Knabb’s meticulous translation of all the filmscripts (which Debord’s widow Alice asked him to make to accompany the long-awaited rerelease of the films, beginning with a complete retrospective at the Venice Film Festival) is supplemented with numerous illustrations and documents and elucidated by extensive annotations. For this new edition Knabb has revised the translations, updated the filmography, and added the scathing video that Debord made shortly before his death: Guy Debord, His Art and His Time.

“We are disarmed, but what they will never be able to take away from us, if we defend it tooth and nail, is our consciousness and the collective.”Ulrike Meinhof was one of the founding members of the Red Army Faction. This followed her lengthy involvement in the protest movements of the 1960s, during which she had become the left’s most respected journalist in the Federal Republic of Germany. Incarcerated and held in isolation after her arrest in June 1972, she died in 1976 in her prison cell, having been subjected to years of torture as well as police and media smear campaigns. For this collection, in order to show who she really was, her surviving comrades in arms have released the letters she wrote for the group’s internal discussion in prison, as well as a number of texts delivered during the main Stammheim trial against members of the RAF.With an introduction and comments by her former comrades, as well as chronological and bibliographical references, this volume includes the last texts that Meinhof had prepared for the prisoners’ collective, in which she played an active part, alongside a statement that she presented at another trial, regarding the group’s founding act: the prison breakout of Andreas Baader, in addition to other texts, some published here for the first time in English.

The story of the Centro Iberico, a legendary music venue of the UK''s postpunk era, has been fragmentary and disjointed, its tangled twelve-year history never properly documented before now. Its tale spans the Spanish Civil War as we follow an anarchist hero who spilt blood for his beliefs, fought the Nazis, fought Franco''s fascists as part of the resistance, endured a death sentence commuted to twenty years'' imprisonment, before devoting his twilight years to evangelizing his cause from exile in London. His survival and the inauguration of the Centro Iberico were thanks to London''s anarchist underground, which maintained a foothold and kept the torches burning despite harassment and disinterest, before finding new life amid punk''s co-optaion of ''anarchy'' as a youth culture phenomenon. Punks and political anarchists rallied together to support the victims of an egregious and shambolic antiterror trial. The Centro Iberico''s peripatetic journey ended as it came into contact with the squatters occupying an abandoned school, morphing from its activist roots to become a creative hub which gave refuge to the residents of the anarchy center before the first murmurs of the ''80s construction boom finally ended its existence. The Centro Iberico was the only consistently established anarchist center that survived throughout the decade, forming a key connection between the international political prisoner support offered by the Anarchist Black Cross, the anarchist groups abroad that fueled the Black Flag newspaper, while sustaining its own activities in support of the cause.

Fearless honesty. Deep despair. Resilient discovery. Profound forgiveness. Revolutionary hope and liberation. Submerged is the story of one woman''s journey from a nightmare of childhood sexual abuse through a world of drug gangs and murder to prison and, ultimately, personal redemption through faith and a dedication to helping others. Sheena King’s raw, harrowing memoir anchored in revolutionary and transformative love is, at the same time, a story shared by tens of thousands of women, especially women of color who are incarcerated as the result of events that began with abuse by someone who should have been there to protect and nurture them. During her years in prison, Sheena found the strength to free herself through the process of helping countless other survivors of childhood abuse. Now she offers her memoir with the express hope that it will help many more. As Rikeyah Lindsay of the Abolitionist Law Center writes in her foreword, “We must take our collective healing seriously, interrogating the root causes and demanding accountability not only for ourselves but also for the systems that create the conditions in which so much harm can occur.” With Lindsay''s foreword and an introduction by Victoria Law, Submerged offers essential insights for all who want to understand and participate in the growing movement for alternatives to incarceration. In her own introduction Sheena King writes: “I’ve told my story. Now tell yours. It will free you.”

Anyone who thinks that, at an early age, they can plan their entire life is mistaken.Nancy Kress has been exploring the possibilities of genetic engineering, human evolution, alien contact, artificial intelligence, and the future of the species for over forty years, with one eye on the bleeding edge of science and the other on the human soul and what makes it bleed. These stories, and the essays that explain her own history and worldview, compose a brief tourist’s guide for the world to come.In the title memoir, “Not What I Intended,” Kress discusses a childhood and community life where no young girl ever dreams of becoming a writer, and how she made those nondreams come true.“Patent Infringement” is a short piece inspired by Kress’s own time writing corporate copy that managed to predict COVID, COVID vaccines, and the patenting of genes for profit.“Laws of Survival” is a tale of first contact in which humanity is hardly the species the aliens are interested in—can an amateur dog trainer save the world the aliens have trashed, or at least herself?“Amy Lowell, Cixin Liu, Jane Austen, and the Art of Fiction” is a compelling essay about the human drive to create patterns, and what the cognitive limitations of patternmaking means for fiction … and for politics.“Machine Learning” is science fiction but might also be a work of psychological realism about the creation of AI and the healing of a scientist’s grief over the loss of his daughter.And featuring an in-depth Q&A with new Outspoken Authors series coeditor Nick Mamatas, who traveled up to Seattle to talk to Nancy about the future of plagues, sleepless nights, teaching science fiction writing, and dogs dogs dogs!

Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles - Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion - alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis. Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active participant: prisoner, infiltrator, activist. The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.

The near-total ban on abortion in Poland, new hate speech laws across Europe, a de facto ban of sea rescue in the Mediterranean, and the criminalization of sex work - these trends toward a harsher politics of criminalization, securitization, and threat are spreading throughout the continent. In eight moving, illustrated vignettes, readers encounter everyday people involved in search-and-rescue activism, sex work, internet content moderation, abortion activism, drug use. We set sail with civilians who take action to save the lives of migrants at sea who face increasingly militarized borders, follow the journey of a woman jailed for a bus fare she couldn''t pay, see the impact of state neglect and violence on people who use drugs in Poland, and follow a migrant woman navigating the challenges of sex work policing who finds resilience in her community, and more. These ethnographic stories not only bring to life alarming insights into criminalization across Europe but the hope and solidarity of everyday people in the face of increasing repression. The criminalized don''t stay put. They adapt, resist, and survive. Their personal stories are rarely seen or heard, until now. With contributions from Agata Chelstowska, Agata Dziuban, Aleksandra ''Sasza'' Stachowska, Asia Bordowa, Beate Binder, Friederike Faust, Florian Krynicki, Carmen Grimm, H-P Lehkonen, Janita-Marja Juvonen, Jan Peukert, Jeremy Geeraert, Joris Bas Backer, Justyna Struzik, Juulia Kela, Katarzyna Urbaniak, Monique Horstmann, Salla Sariola, Sylvain Adam, Todd Sekuler, Valerie Assmann.

Clay Blackburn - poet, book scout, and sometimes detective - cruises the mean, and sometimes not so mean, streets of Berkeley. With his accomplices, a soldier of fortune, a ''defrocked'' FBI agent, and a smooth and sexy con man, he lives a life of bisexual sensation with a little crime solving on the side. As such, Blackburn is a sly, witty, and more or less reliable raconteur of the last thirty something years of the Bay Area''s radical bohemia and bookselling. And in the tradition of Ian Rankin''s Edinburgh, and Jean-Claude Izzo''s Marseilles, bears uncomfortable witness to Berkeley''s descent from countercultural paradise to neoliberal inferno. This omnibus collection collects the novels The Chandler Apartments (2002), The Incredible Double (2010), and the previously unpublished Mayakovsky''s Bugatti (2025), and includes the Blackburn short story ''Righteous Kill'' (2021).

James Kelman has made use of the short form all of his writing life, calling on the different traditions where such stories are central within the culture, beginning and ending in freedom, the freedom to create. People should know that their stories count, no matter how personal, how emotional, how eccentric, how trivial, how stupid or how self-centred they may appear. Just make them, and make them your own, in spite of hostility, of negativity, of the threat of punishment: go to it. Language is with the user and you are the user. Take these stories and make them your own

James Kelman has made use of the short form all of his writing life, calling on the different traditions where such stories are central within the culture, beginning and ending in freedom, the freedom to create. People should know that their stories count, no matter how personal, how emotional, how eccentric, how trivial, how stupid or how self-centred they may appear. Just make them, and make them your own, in spite of hostility, of negativity, of the threat of punishment: go to it. Language is with the user and you are the user. Take these stories and make them your own

The story begins with the anarchic forces of nature creating the land and the cooperative indigenous communities that thrived before the European conquest. We next see the revolt against domination through the Enslaved Peoples'' Uprising of 1811, the rise of maroon communities, the work of figures such as anarchist geographer Elisee Reclus and utopian revolutionary Joseph Dejacque, and the moving history of labour militancy - exemplified by the First International, the General Strike of 1892, and the rise of the International Workers of the World. The anarchic aspects of jazz are explored, including its birthplace, the famous red-light district of Storyville. Other episodes recount the history of the Black Panthers, including the legendary shootout in the Desire Project, and the important role anarchists played in the grassroots recovery after Hurricane Katrina. The often-subversive People''s Carnival is depicted, from the history of the Mardi Gras Indians through today''s anarchist marching Krewes. The book concludes with the recent struggle to take down the confederate monuments, and the growth of a decentralized, autonomous mutual aid movement. These stories are recounted by surregionalist writer Max Cafard and brought vividly to life through the striking images of comix artist Vulpes.

Shadows in the Struggle for Equality is the first-hand account of Boris Yelensky, an activist of the Anarchist Red Cross (later the Anarchist Black Cross), during the Russian revolutionary movement from 1905 through 1917, and the subsequent Leninist/Stalinist repression. Written with great humility and compassion, Yelensky recalls his fifty years of tireless organizing to aid victims of state oppression and injustice, beginning with a vivid sketch of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and the critical role played by anarchists. He then provides the rich history of the Anarchist Red Cross spanning the time from the Revolution to his settling in the US where he dedicated his life and his book ''to the Fighters for Freedom, Humanism and Justice, to those who endeavored to help these fighters by applying the principle of mutual aid.'' In telling why an anarchist relief organization became necessary he calls attention to a neglected aspect of revolutionary history - the sabotage and discrimination of many social-democrats against their fellow-prisoners and in the outside relief organizations. Of the vast sums collected all over the world, from Czarist times up through the 1950s when the book was written, very little reached the anarchist prisoners. With newly translated material, and over a dozen beautiful illustrations by N.O. Bonzo, this stunning edition of Shadows in the Struggle for Equality will serve to inspire a continuation of solidarity and support for those who are incarcerated in the struggle for freedom, humanism, and justice.

Almost all of our stories follow the same basic pattern: beginning, middle, end: exposition, action, and climax. It''s a neat and tidy way of telling a story. But life''s not like that, is it? It doesn''t obey the rules. Life''s stories - like the stories told here in But, personal and impersonal, historical and contemporary - are punctuated by disruption, derailment, and digression. Stories where the good guys lose. Stories where the bad girls win. Stories that just stop in the middle. Stories that fizzle out or simply never get going. Stories that don''t make sense. Stories that start where they should end and end where they start. Stories that go round in a cyclical loop, forever. Unfinished stories. Unstarted stories. Stories that stutter and mumble, that cough and splutter. That''s what we have here in this book: real stories, that do all of the above. That''s why this book is called But. Because the but is there to disrupt the easy normality of the way we tell our stories. This book is a collection of stories about real lives, real people, and real life. Stuttering, wayward, disjointed, funny, ridiculous, and unplanned.

Almost all of our stories follow the same basic pattern: beginning, middle, end: exposition, action, and climax. It''s a neat and tidy way of telling a story. But life''s not like that, is it? It doesn''t obey the rules. Life''s stories - like the stories told here in But, personal and impersonal, historical and contemporary - are punctuated by disruption, derailment, and digression. Stories where the good guys lose. Stories where the bad girls win. Stories that just stop in the middle. Stories that fizzle out or simply never get going. Stories that don''t make sense. Stories that start where they should end and end where they start. Stories that go round in a cyclical loop, forever. Unfinished stories. Unstarted stories. Stories that stutter and mumble, that cough and splutter. That''s what we have here in this book: real stories, that do all of the above. That''s why this book is called But. Because the but is there to disrupt the easy normality of the way we tell our stories. This book is a collection of stories about real lives, real people, and real life. Stuttering, wayward, disjointed, funny, ridiculous, and unplanned.

The Housing Monster is a scathing illustrated essay that takes one seemingly simple, everyday thing - a house - and looks at the social relations that surround it. Moving from intensely personal thoughts and interactions to large-scale political and economic forces, it reads alternately like a worker''s diary, a story, a psychology of everyday life, a historical account, an introduction to Marxist critique of political economy, and an angry flyer someone passed you on the street. Starting with the construction site and the physical building of houses, the book slowly builds and links more and more issues together: from gentrification and city politics to gender roles and identity politics, from subcontracting and speculation to union contracts and negotiation, from individual belief, suffering, and resistance to structural division, necessity, and instability. What starts as a look at housing broadens into a critique of capitalism as a whole. The text is accompanied by clean black-and-white illustrations that are mocking, beautiful, and bleak. This new edition includes analysis situating and exploring the text''s impact around the world by Lazo Ediciones in Argentina, Ben Kritikos in Scotland, and Sean KB in the US.