‘Golden Rule’ Boat Sails ‘Great Loop’ in U.S. & Canada to Raise Awareness About Global Nuclear Disaster

The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements by Kimberley Kinder. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2021.

In the final hours of 2008, I moved to Philadelphia. George W. Bush was still president, as Obama began assembling his team of neoliberal economic advisors to bail out the banks that had just crashed the economy. Before I was able to find a wage job during the height of the recession, I picked up a volunteer application at the local anarchist bookstore. By early 2009, I had finished my training shifts and was quickly given keys to the Wooden Shoe.

Founded in 1976, Wooden Shoe Books and Records is an all-volunteer collective where all decisions are made by consensus at monthly meetings open to all staffers. When I joined, the lease at its location on Fifth Street was about to expire, so I participated in the process of moving to its current location on South Street. It was an exciting time get involved and a perfect way to find instant community and camaraderie in a big city where I had never lived before. I stayed in Philly for over 12 years and was involved with the bookstore for most of that time; the only constant in my life there.

In her new book, The Radical Bookstore, University of Michigan professor Kimberley Kinder studies spaces like the Wooden Shoe and the role they continue to play in movements for social justice and transformation. She highlights the importance of brick-and-mortar “counterspaces” that help sustain organizing and movement building in between bursts of protest activity in the streets.

The criteria for the 77 bookstores, infoshops and community centers she researched was limited to “print-based movement spaces.” They are all public-facing physical venues that include a focus on print objects and their missions are oriented toward radical left activism. They all “approach their business primarily as social movement tools.” (Infoshops are autonomous, typically anarchist spaces. They tend to include do-it-yourself zines from the community and provide space for activist meetings and events. Some have less of a retail component, and might offer a free library and other mutual-aid services.) Kinder calls this “constructive activism,” a term she adapted from feminist geographers like Daphne Spain, which “highlights the material base of social organizing.” With a focus on mechanisms over particular issues, the book explores the crucial contributions of such durable spaces in the ongoing struggle for a better, more just world.

So, it made sense that Kinder reached out to the Wooden Shoe in April 2017. She had visited the store the previous summer and was interested in speaking with a member of the collective more in depth, so she could include us as a case study for the book. I volunteered and we spoke on the phone for about an hour about my experiences with the Wooden Shoe and to fill in some of the blanks beyond the information included on our website. We discussed some of the political goals of movement-oriented spaces and our aim, as anarchists, “to challenge structures of domination and oppression.” We also talked about how the Wooden Shoe is volunteer-run and how that has played a big role in sustaining the business for over 40 years. I explained, “If we were depending on paying ourselves, we probably would have [closed].” I also compared our success with other similar collectives that had recently gone out of business: “They had at least some members that were being paid and depending on that space for their livelihood.”

The two I had in mind were Food for Thought Books in Amherst, Massachusetts, which shut down in 2014, and Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, which managed to stay open only a couple years longer after a decade struggling to compete with corporate online behemoths like Amazon. I had the privilege of volunteering at Rainbow from 2004 to 2005 and, even back then, the staff collective was struggling to find creative ways to encourage students to buy textbooks from their local cooperatively managed, worker-owned shop, instead of ordering them online from a chain store. “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” exclaimed Rainbow’s posters across the University of Wisconsin campus. But by 2016, Rainbow could no longer afford to compete.

In The Radical Bookstore, Kinder briefly traces this history of “activist-entrepreneurs,” favoring the independent bookstore model in the 1960s and 1970s. This was an effective strategy not only for disseminating radical ideas, but for creating alternative spaces for movements to build and grow by tapping into the consumerist impulse permeating across the United States. The financial effectiveness of this model began to dwindle in the 1990s when two-thirds of all indie bookstores went out of business as a result of economic restructuring policies. Despite more recent examples, like Food for Thought and Rainbow, Kinder cites a slight resurgence of independent shops since the year I began staffing at the Wooden Shoe, 12 years ago. She argues this is a result of some “reformatting as events-oriented, nonprofit hybrids” and also because of “trends like ethical consumerism” that involve supporting local businesses.

Despite the grim reality of increased corporate consolidation, gentrification, and the ubiquity of digital media dismantling so much of this thriving network of radical bookstores and other “print-based movement spaces,” Kinder argues that analyzing the “constructive dynamics provides an important antidote to the usual narratives of decline.” Even though it is more difficult now to replicate the business models of the past, she explains, “Focusing only on the postmortem of victims misses an equally important opportunity to study why some places survive and thrive.” Adding that, “By looking at stories of resilience and innovation, scholars and activists can potentially find the nuggets of a blueprint for emerging business models that make independent spaces viable, even in a corporate, digital age.” (page 79)

Nearly 45 years after it was founded, the Wooden Shoe is just one of many counterspaces that have managed to survive and thrive. This has particularly been the case in recent years as increasing numbers of people have become radicalized through the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements, in addition to the election of Trump and the subsequent rise of the fascistic “alt-right.” During this period, I helped organize and host dozens of in-store events that brought all kinds of people into the space, from author talks and panel discussions to film screenings and potlucks. And more recently, the COVID pandemic has reminded us how important autonomous, physical space for organizing truly is, as we collectively struggle with the isolation and alienation of the past 16 months.

This past April, I left Philly and moved to Boston. My new apartment is walking distance from an even older anarchist bookstore: The Lucy Parsons Center. Like the customers Kimberley Kinder met there during her research, I often visit the infoshop, founded in 1969, “to find a sense of camaraderie.” And now that I no longer host events through Zoom for the Wooden Shoe, perhaps, one day, I’ll start volunteering there, too.

Matt Dineen is a writer and activist based in Boston. He has written for Toward Freedom since 2005.

“Here we are again, 20 years later, because imperialism persists,” Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley told activist group Popular Resistance. “As long as that is true, the location of the war will change, the people waging the war will change, but we will still have wars. Our goal is to end imperialism.”

Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, by Dan Kovalik (Hot Books: New York, 2021)

Academic and activist Dan Kovalik’s new book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, was written on the frontlines of the twin struggles of our time, the class struggle and the fight for Black liberation. Reading it brought me back to so many magical and contradictory movement moments that I could not resist writing a review.

‘White People Go to the Back of the March’

On the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in 2017, thousands of protesters took to Fifth Avenue and the frigid streets of New York City to demand criminal charges against the police who murdered Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge; Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota; and hundreds of other unarmed Black and brown men. Some Black Lives Matter march marshals had determined that Black and brown families and activists—presented as the only real victims and fighters—would march in the front. White people—presented as all equal benefactors of white supremacy and white privilege—were assigned to march in the back, separated from the youthful, militant front. It was a strange scene. Forty-nine years after the U.S. state assassinated Dr. King for risking his life to organize a multiracial movement against white supremacy—and in his final months, a Poor People’s Campaign against the capitalist system—surely he would find it curious we no longer needed outright white supremacists like Bull Connor or George Wallace; we were now capable of segregating our own marches.

So many questions leapt into my mind as my eyes traced the 10-block-long protest. Where did poor whites belong? Veterans? Whites who had been through the prison system? How about Black students who had both parents in a position to pay their tuition out of pocket at NYU or Columbia? They had all earned the front? Then there was my Ernesto Rafael, my son, half Dominican, half poor-white, harassed by the police too many times in the Bronx. Where did he “belong,” according to the marshals?

This was but one example of the new racial dynamics on display across the country in the BLM movement from Oakland to Boston, and everywhere in between. For class conscious revolutionaries throwing down in the heart of this mass movement, it represented a series of fresh, unique challenges.

When I picked up Kovalik’s new book, I was intrigued by his biting class analysis of the similar experiences he had. In chapter 2, “Cancellation of a Peace Activist,” he writes directly about being a participant on the frontlines of the BLM movement in Pennsylvania, ducking and dodging police batons as organizers collectively figured out their next strategic moves. Kovalik, a union and human rights lawyer and professor, based out of Pittsburgh, dives deep into the contradictions he and so many others experienced. Kovalik slams both the arrogance of isolated white anarchists whose faux militancy puts all protesters at risk, as well as the bullying tactics and racial reductionism of some radical liberals. This took me back to the explosion of protests following the police murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014, which brought millions of people into the streets to denounce the epidemic of police terror in Black and brown communities. Millions were in motion and different political tendencies vied for leadership. Kovalik examines key lessons to be drawn from the almost decade of collective experience we have as a movement in what came to be known as “Black Lives Matter.” This is but one must-read chapter in Kovalik’s exciting new book.

Woke Capitalism

Kovalik’s book is an expose of Woke Capitalism and the cancer of cancel culture.

While millions took to the streets to stop President George W. Bush from invading Iraq, the peace movement was eerily silent when Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, became “the drone-warrior-in-chief, dropping at least 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone.” (pg. 109) He critiques the peace movement for going quiet every time a Democrat is (s)elected to the oval office.

This page-turner exposes today’s liberal establishment, which touts “racial equity” without ever questioning the underlying structure that intensifies white supremacist control of society’s institutions. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, is but one example of a liberal who bloviates over the U.S. Capitol rioters and their violent methods. Yet, he advocated for the bombing, sacking and recolonization of Iraq. (pg. VIII) The book exposes corporate and campus departments that pay hefty salaries to “experts” to lecture on “racial justice” without ever touching the structures that buttress white supremacy and racial and class segregation. These defenders of racial capitalism—from the academy to the pressroom—give political cover to hucksters, who make a killing by bullying white liberals into forking over money, lest they be labeled racist. As one class-conscious scholar sarcastically asks in Black Agenda Report: Do we really “wonder why these rural voters didn’t just go to their local Barnes and Noble to purchase a copy of How to Be an Anti-racist before the election?” Are all of the books that have emerged from the White Privilege Industrial Complex reaching that mass of “deplorables,” whom Arlie Hochchild refers to in her monumental sociological exposé as “strangers in their own land”? (“Own land” as in stolen Indigenous land).

Kovalik takes on the Frankenstein-esque outgrowth of cancellations in academic institutions and beyond, asking what are the political forces behind them? He offers the real-life example of the canceling of Molly Rush, an octogenarian peace activist who reposted a quote that took on a life of its own. Instead of speaking with her face to face to clear the air, internet activists dragged her down and expelled her from the movement, like a group of pre-teens playing a game of Telephone. (pg. 13) Kovalik surmises that many keyboard warriors who have never stared down police lines or even handed out a flyer don’t want dialogue and growth. They want to score woke points and “likes” to the detriment of other comrades.

Liberal bully politics short-changes us all. Kovalik takes a big leap to the international realm to examine the West’s arrogant dismissal of Cuban medical internationalism, the Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine and China’s success controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. China had two deaths in 2021. Kovalik concludes:

“It simply boggles the mind how the mainstream media and the Democratic Party elite are willing to compromise world peace and public health all in the interest of political gain. In so doing, they have taken ‘cancel culture’ to the very extreme, and they may get us all canceled, permanently, in the process…” (pg. 139)

We Never Give Up on Our People

It’s a new era. One tweet-turned-Twitter-game-of-telephone can ruin a comrade’s life.

How does the state operate online? How do anarchists operate online? When do they intermingle? Any anonymous account can start a smear campaign against any public figure.

This book invites us to ask: If we cancel every last screw-up, addict and lumpenized scroundrel, who will absorb the body blows needed to bob and weave forward in the class struggle?

When in history has another social class organized, led and defended a revolution? The petite-bourgeoisie blows with the wind. Who will be left? Who is willing to put in that work? Who knows hell well enough not to fear it? Nicaraguan national hero Augusto Sandino said, “Only the workers and peasants will make it all the way.” Kovalik is not turning his back and giving up on the potential cadre of the future. Will you?

As Marxists, revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, we believe nothing is permanent; everything is in a state of flux. The watchwords are growing through contradictions among the people, healing and restorative justice. We don’t have the luxury of discarding comrades. There has to be a path back or we risk cannibalizing and condemning our own ranks. Who would Malcolm X have been if everyone had given up on him in his 20s, when he was imprisoned? How many young Bobbies, Hueys and Assatas are sidelined right now? How can we be less judgemental and give people opportunities to learn from their mistakes?

The Other White America

Black and Brown people in the United States, and those in solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement, have every right to be angry. But angry at whom?

Most white people are not CEOs or members of the ruling class; many more are National Guard soldiers, correction officers and other reactionary rent-a-cops, the overseers of a society divided between the haves and the have-nots. But the racial portrait of state repression is more complicated. Fifty-eight percent of the Atlanta police force is Black. Over half of Washington, D.C.’s police force is Black. 

A liberal portrait of white privilege fails to tell the full class story in the United States. Seventy million people received Medicaid in 2016—43 percent were white. Of 43 million food stamp recipients that year, 36.2 percent were white. Over 100,000 overdoses took place in the past year. The overwhelming majority of opioid overdoses occur among poor whites, roughly 72 percent. Are these cast-off layers of our class our enemies?

Kovalik points out that similar to white people, “the top 10 percent of Black households hold 75 percent of Black wealth.” (pg. 96) Is every brother your brother?

Given the complex class and racial terrain, do we cast poor and working-class whites away as “a basket of deplorables” or do win them over to defend their class interests? Wouldn’t sticking all white protesters in the back of marches with more yuppified layers only alienate them more? Is the movement a “safe space” for them, or more importantly a revolutionizing space? 

Cancel This Book refuses to give up on the other white America—the poor, forgotten and de-industrialized “oxy-electorate” (writer Kathleen Frydl’s term for white people who live in the U.S. Rust Belt, where OxyContin addictions are on the rise). Those white people are full of disappointment and hatred for this system—between the tens of millions who refused to vote for another neoliberal Dixiecrat like Hillary Clinton, and the tens of millions of others who were duped into believing a spoiled, trash-talking, billionaire, real-estate mogul hoax and punk with infinite air time was their white knight.

As Malcolm X taught: “The truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it is against the oppressor.” We can win over workers who have only ever known the american-dreaming chauvinism they have been fed. Bursting with ideological perspicacity and revolutionary hope, this book pushes us not to get caught up in the liberal webs of identity politics and call-out culture.

Kovalik also challenges the white liberals who unknowingly acted as “masochists at the protests.” This constructive critique is not meant to take away from anyone’s hard work and real contributions. Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) was one outgrowth of these liberal politics, which relegated many well-intentioned, liberal, student and petite-bourgeoisie (“middle-class”) whites to cheerleader positions. Is this the militant mass-movement that is going to stand up to the State Department, the Pentagon, the police and the intelligence agencies? When Malcolm held up white abolitionist John Brown’s life as an example of real struggle to follow, he was challenging these liberal politics.

Amidst the ever-evolving dialectics of our movement, Kovalik’s book comes as a breath of fresh air. It is a clarion call about the damage we are collectively doing to our movement if we do not center class politics next to the need for Black liberation and the liberation of all oppressed people.

Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels within the Americas region. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.