Help The Lucy Parsons Center buy the Farm! Bob Black
Anarchy #55
Letters Section

The Lucy Parsons Center, a Boston bookstore, solicits the readers of Anarchy for money - a lot of money - so it can buy a building. LPC posted the same appeal in December 2002 on the A-Infos website. Given the anarchist character of both these sites, as well as the flaunting of the name of the famous anarchist Lucy Parsons, anarchist readers probably assumed that the Lucy Parsons Center is an anarchist bookstore. That is what they are supposed to think, but it isn't true.

When, in December, the LPC pitch was posted at A-Infos, someone raised the issue whether LPC was really an anarchist bookstore if it banned the books of heterodox anarchists, specifically, myself. There ensued a tremendous uproar - even before I intervened. LPC apparatchik "MaRK" - remember that name! - was eventually forced to admit that the Lucy Parsons Center was not anarchist. Rather, LPC was a service center for left-liberals and leftists.

The claim to "well-stocked shelves" refers to quantity, not quality. The anarchist content of LPC holdings was admitted to be at best 5%. Now I am not suggesting that an anarchist bookstore carry only explicitly anarchist texts. In the first place, there are not enough in-print anarchist texts in English to stock even a small bookstore. In the second place, there are many texts not ostensibly anarchist but which are effectively anarchist or close enough to be important to anarchists (Fourier, Morris, Wilde, Landauer, the Ranters and the Diggers, the Frankfort School, the Situationists, various Greens, etc.). And my ideal anarchist bookstore would carry plenty of well-chosen volumes of philosophy, anthropology and especially history. Too many anarchists are semi-educated freaks who have read about Kronstadt and Spain but are hazy about what the American Civil War was all about and even when it took place. Anarchists need context to understand their own history.

What they do not need is most of what occupies LPC's not-so-well-stocked shelves. At A-Infos, LPC partisans - who were usually also NEFAC partisans - grudgingly disclosed that their stock mostly consists of books on Third World national liberation movements, trade-union labor movements, black nationalism, feminism (little of which is anarcha-feminism), leftist third-party politics, and lots of Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism/Maoism. You can get Chairman Bob Avakian of the Revolutionary Communist Party at LPC, but no my books; for them you have to go to more pro-anarchist locales like the Boston Public Library, the Harvard library, the MIT library, etc.

An LPC partisan (probably MaRK) boasted that "former Black Panthers" frequented the store - a truly pathetic claim to vicarious, out-of-date street cred. I suggested that these middle-aged brothers, and LPC customers generally, probably never noticed that they were in an anarchist bookstore. It was in this context that the NEFAC/LPC spokesmen (they are always men) asserted that LPC was not an anarchist bookstore, and that they felt no responsibility toward the anarchist movement.

MaRK, LPC's main spokesman at A-Infos (and the likely author of the appeal in Anarchy), also heads up the NEFAC nucleus which controls LPC in the time-honored way vanguards dominate larger organizations. In this, at least, they're not hypocrites, because NEFAC is avoedly "Platformist", i.e., vanguardist. In dramatic contrast to LPC's open-arms approach to the statist and/or reformist left is the insulting, dismissive attitude MaRK expressed toward anarchists in Anarchy. He holds anarchists in such contempt that he must assume we've so soon forgotten what he said about us in Anarchy #55.

Responding, but not concretely, to the critiques of so-called Platformism in Anarchy #55, MaRK explained that the Platformists desire a "necessary rupture in the movement" between advocates of "pro-organizational, class struggle anarcho-communism" and all other anarchists. An "unbridgeable chasm" divides them - and that's a good thing. NEFAC does "not want to waste [its] time trying to orient the entire anarchist 'movement' to our program" - fat chance! - since "the anarchist 'movement', on the whole, is something of a lost cause and not worth the effort. I personally don't want to waste my time arguing theory with primitivists, individualists, or 'post-leftists' in an effort to build some false sense of unity."

Fair enough. But it is precisely a "false sense of unity" which there operators simulate and exploit in their truly insolent and brazen fund-raising appeals to anarchists. If the Lucy Parsons Center wants to be a service center for the Boston left, fine, but in that case, why doesn't the Boston left buy them the building? For nobody else derives any benefit from the Lucy Parsons Center. Anarchists in a generous mood might better donate money to C.A.L. Press, which is always in desperate need of money to publish the largest-circulation anarchist magazine in North America, and also to publish the kind of genuinely radical anarchist books rarely put out by AK press. MaRK has clearly stated - in this very magazine that all anarchists who decline to sign on to his extraordinarily narrow sectarian program shoud fuck off. MaRK is the longest-tenured member of the LPC collective. He takes pride in being the only current collectivist who was involved in banning my books from LPC, a ban which included a subsequently published book, Anarchy after Leftism, from the same publisher as this magazine. I doubt that I am the only banned anarchist at LPC, which really has no more claim on anarchist generosity than Waldenbooks or Barnes & Noble.

Bob Black
POB 3142
Albany, NY 12203
Abobob51@aol.com

Why?

Well, their main guy is MaRK.

Boston IndyMedia seems to be a lackie for Beach Cities IndyMedia, which is, of course, KOBE.

So, now I am apart of Boston IMC too? News to me.

People like Bob Black and Fake Makhno should really get a life and stop with the pathetic attempts at trashing other anarchists, especialy when their attacks are so poorly researched and just plain sad.

I am sure someone from LPC will write something more formal, but for the time being people can read some quickies I wrote on Infoshop.org awhile back:



MaRK writes on Thursday December 11 2003 @ 04:10PM PST: [ reply | parent ]

Got the new AJODA's in at the Lucy Parsons Center today. Man, you were right Bob, that letter is, uh, quite a doozy. It was probably one of the more pathetic things I have seen put to print in quite some time! It was hard to not picture you throwing some kind of infantile temper-tantrum while writing it. Indeed, it reads about as factually accurate as your average temper-tantrum.

Have you just given up on fact-checking altogether in your old age?

Who said the Lucy Parsons Center has only 5% anarchist material? Anyone who has ever visited our bookshop would know this is total bullshit, and that you are a complete liar. You have never been to our bookstore since I have worked here (since 1996), so why would you think you are in some kind of position to make a statement on our stock?

In case you were wondering, as far as I know, you are the only author banned from the store. It would probably be easy enough to over-turn this ban, but since most of the current members in the LPC collective have probably never even heard of you, there is no rush to do so. I am certainly not going to initiate it (for the record, far from being personally involved in banning your books - another lie - I abstained from the vote when it took place).

In case you missed that last part, I said the reason the ban remains is because most current collective members HAVE NEVER HEARD OF YOU. That would be because you are apparently NOT ESPECIALLY RELEVANT. A wash-up. A has-been. You get the point. I assume this is not isolated to Boston, because I often see you books discounted elsewhere, which leads to believe they have been remaindered. You know why people remainder books, right? It's because they sell poorly. Must really hurt inside, huh?

What other lies to dispel? Well, there is hardly some NEFAC cabal controlling the LPC. This is another lie, coupled with complete fantasy. Running a bookstore is hard, often unrewarding work. It is currently done by about two dozen people (a small minority of which also happens to work with NEFAC). What exactly would be gained by ensuring NEFAC-dominance over the LPC? All that work day in/day out so we can ensure that our magazine can be displayed a little more prominantly on the shelves? Are you serious? I worked at the LPC long before NEFAC formed, as did most collective members who also now happen to be in NEFAC.

And who ever said we were unaccountable to the anarchist movement? You came up with this on your own. Another lie.

A majority of our stock is black nationalist, Third World national, Maoist, liberal feminist, etc? News to me. Sounds kinda like your full of shit (Re: lying). And what exactly do we have from Bob Avaikian other than the two copies of the Revolutionary Worker that get dropped off each week and don't sell? Nothing. Liar.

Brazen fund-raising appeals to anarchists? Well, a couple of anarchist websites and email lists got a copy of our fundraising solicitation, as did dozens of other non-anarchist sites and lists, and also the thousands of people on our mailing list. I think even AJODA was nice enough to print it. That Jason McQuinn is a nice guy. He doesn't tend to lie either. I like him.

In closing, no one has ever said the Lucy Parsons Center was an anarchist bookstore. If you were under that impression, that's your problem. We are a non-sectarian, independent, radical leftwing bookstore that happens to be run by anarchists. A brief check of our website (http://www.tao.ca/~lucyparsons) would've clued even the slowest among us of that fact.

Okay, hope you come up with some better material to hit us with next time. Until then, fuck off!

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MaRK writes on Tuesday December 16 2003 @ 10:13AM PST: [ reply | parent ]

[Bob Black] "LPC spokesmen asserted that their store was not anarchist, it was a service center for the local left. I only reported what the LPC leftists said here."

Once again for the slow-wits: the Lucy Parsons Center has never, ever claimed to be an exclusively anarchist bookstore (despite the fact that we have more anarchist books and publications in stock than any anarchist bookshop in the English-speaking world!). Check our website. Really. It's all right there.

I am hardly the main spokesperson for the LPC. I just happen to be one of the few who tool around on this website from time to time.

No one ever said our book stock was "overwhelmingly statist/Marxist/Third World nationalist". You made that up completely. I said we carried a VARIETY of literature from DIVERSE sections of the left, which yes, includes SOME statist/Marxist/Third World nationalist titles. So what? We probably don't have anymore of this material than, say Left Bank Books (Seattle) or Librarie Alternative (Montreal).

How is LPC difficult to distinguish from NEFAC? One is a independent radical bookstore, the other is a political organization. There are also a number of anarchists from synthesis groups like BAAM! and the Jamaica Plain Anarchist Group, as well as Food Not Bombs, the IWW, South End Press, etc. None of these people have any difficulty disguishing the LPC from NEFAC... but what do they know, they only work here.