Your say / anarchism
‘Bristol Anarchist Bookfair has a potent magic’
We call Bristol Anarchist Bookfair the ‘Anarchist Christmas’. It’s not because of all the pageantry, the stack of presents you leave with or even the cake.
We live in a divided world, spiralling further into reactionary protectionism and hostile politics cheered on by hate-filled populists.
No one is finding inspiration in the doom-scroll. The authoritarians and capitalists that seek to reduce us to idle accepting consumers thrive when our communities are atomised and disconnected.
When we’re all just about holding on, staring into a screen and desperately trying to find a moment of hope, we are stuck in a cycle of decay.
Even if some thread gives us a temporary escape from the immense weight of the world, the horrors being visited on innocent peoples in distant lands, the political currents stealing our liberties and just the sheer unrelenting burden of surviving capitalism, after a suffocating mire… and you’ve got to be up for work in a few hours.
We’ve slipped into a deep reliance on electronic frontiers and the false promises of social media platforms which in theory connect us all, but in reality leave us lonely, divided and aimless.
We’re in an overwhelming ocean of people all desperately reaching out but ultimately, isolated. Each alone in our rooms, doom-scrolling, feeling helpless before the terrifying might of the powerful.
Elsewhere, the far right offers a sense of belonging through exclusion, unity through hatred, purpose through submission, the odious messaging woven deep into deceptive parades – using the love of working class people and their natural desire to find community, space and place – to turn them against each other.
Against that, anarchist spaces insist on a different form of belonging: one built on mutual aid, solidarity, and the freedom to think and act together.
We call it ‘Anarchist Christmas’ because the local anarchist bookfair is the panacea to all that bleakness. It’s when the family get together, old friends you haven’t seen in ages, that lass you last saw up a tree two years back, your ol’ mucka from that squat you used to visit, and the lad who put you onto Kōtoku Shūsui.
Anti-fascists and anarchists at a rally near the empty Colston plinth – photo: Martin Booth
So what IS an Anarchist bookfair?
A good bookfair feels like a flea market mixed with your festival family. It’s pure positive vibes and a breath of fresh air.
At any of them, you’ll find an array of interesting stalls with everything from climate organisers to wealth redistribution projects, your local hunt sabs to art collectives, radical publishers and solidarity campaigns with comrades in distant lands.
The stalls are almost always backed up by workshops across a dozen topics and an assortment of activities, repair sessions, lovely vegan grub and cake of course.
Right now we’re seeing a renaissance in the UK and across the world, with new physical gatherings cropping up by the dozen, and long established events turning into multi-venue, multi-day events.
More than ever, people are stepping outside the endless scroll and meeting each other in the flesh. Doing so, especially outside of the bars and corporate cafes trying to rinse you, is an act of rebellion.
As if to illustrate the resurgence of face-to-face organising, we’re just one of a dozen events in the past two months; on the same day over in Newport, there is a Radical Bookfair at the Riverfront, the following week Manchester Anarchist Bookfair is at the People’s History Museum, Edinburgh’s Radical Bookfair returns to Assembly Roxy from November 5 to 9, and Swansea is hosting yet another Radical Community Festival
on November 22.
Each of these events will be a wild and exciting array of socialist and anarchist organising, radical education, grassroots publishing. Each is a re-statement that we still believe in community, curiosity and collective imagination.
Whether you come with nothing, or with plenty of pennies to spend, you’re going to leave with a stack of stuff, you’ll have shared a meal with some new friends, laughed, debated and discovered new things, new frontiers in the struggle, and your mind will be cooking up new projects in a swirl.
It’s a potent magic, and it’s why time and time again, anarchists, socialists, land defenders and queer warriors: activists from across the spectrum, head on down.
More than that though, it’s the people outside the choir who come along who are the most important for me.
The people who look at the state of the world and know the enemy arrives not by boat but limousine, who watch the police brutalise the youth, who watch the malignant hate spewing out, and want to do something about it.
Everyone comes into organising such an event from a different point of view. This multi-polarity of political tendency, specific interest, and inclination is to our benefit and it makes for a diverse and rich event for sure.
This is the fifth bookfair I’ve helped co-ordinate, and for me, it’s about the stalls and bringing the crews together, it’s about the art and making anarchism pretty, and well, mostly, it’s about the people who have never been to a bookfair that make the whole effort worthwhile.
Each one of them, at some point during the day, getting that flash of hope, sometimes for the first time.
I remember the various moments in my life that were like a brilliant illumination in the dark: the talks, zines and people who made me believe that we can do this, we can build a better world. Together.
We’ve got over 50 stalls from across Bristol, the South West, Wales, and the UK.
Alongside this are over 20 free workshops with a wide range of styles and issues. There’ll be practical sessions on everything from how to deal with immigration officials, to fixing bikes, to engaging safely with riot shields.
We’ll be exploring the political in the personal with the ‘It Takes A Village’ discussion, DIY HRT for trans folk and will-writing for radicals; expert guidance on what’s going on with the use of terrorism legislation around protest, and easy ways to manage your digital security.
Get up-to-date with the latest disability liberation work or landrights analysis, or join the plenary on effective struggle in the workplace with the sex workers union and hospital staff.
Hear from the global majority folks organising on the front lines against emboldened racism and the activists behind the campaign that toppled Colston.
Or perhaps you just need to be inspired by the Reasons To Be Cheerful plenary, featuring regional campaign victories from the last five years, with an analysis of the tactics that got us there.
Between sessions you’ll eat together, share stories, make plans. Expect lively debates on housing justice, neighbourhood organising, and ecology.
You’ll yap over a brew with older comrades and movement elders as kids flip through illustrated zines and chase each other about underfoot.
In the lively susurration you’ll hear the echo of Bristol’s struggles. This lass from Lawrence Weston speaking about how she can’t find work, a community organiser talking about the life-expectancy gap here of roughly ten years between richest and poorest wards, and some passionate squatter from Stokes Croft delighting in telling tales of misadventure at the Red Factory back in the day.
These are family events (at Bristol we’ve got a supervised crèche and kidspace in a soft play room), and everyone is welcome, even if just for a quick snoop.
Come pop your head through the door and do the last thing the state wants you to do: start talking with your working class neighbours about your problems, your hopes, your dreams, and how you think we might get to a better world.
Bring your questions. Bring your ideas. Bring your hunger for change.
Together we’ll reaffirm that here, in Bristol, in the flesh, we still believe that a better world is possible.
We’ll see you at Anarchist Christmas.
This is an opinion piece by Peter Ó’Máille, one of the organisers of Bristol Anarchist Bookfair which takes place on Saturday at the Elmgrove Centre in Redland
Main photo: Rob Browne
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