#anarchism

Every year, millions of books are pulped by the book industry’s big distribution companies when they are returned by retail outlets and on-line stores. Last month, we purchased another pallet of "damaged" books from our distributor before they were destroyed.

The majority of returns in the book industry come from Amazon, but small retailers are also forced to send good books to the landfill. Why?

While Amazon and Barnes & Noble receive great rates from the industry’s big distributors, small bookstores are squeezed–their margins are substantially smaller. For a small bookstore, selling a new book is only profitable when you sell it at full price. It’s impossible to compete with Amazon’s prices, and returning unsold stock is the only way to ensure that you aren’t losing money.

We pay to save our books from the landfill to challenge the absurd capitalistic logic forcing booksellers everywhere to destroy perfectly good books. Most major publishers have little physical contact with their stock, but our warehousing experience allows us to offer these books back to our readers at a steep discount. We do this to mitigate large losses and to get radical books into more hands.

So, pick up a few great books cheap while helping us fight back against capitalist profligacy.

All damages are 70% off with coupon code "Damages" until August 1st. https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=195

#books #capitalism #anarchism

Today In Labor History April 4, 1866: Russian revolutionary, Dmitry Karakozov attempted to assassinate Czar Alexander II. He failed and the government executed him. Some believe that Karakozov chose the year 1866, since that was the year in which a character in Chernyshevsky’s “What Is To Be Done?” planned to launch a revolution. In the book, the protagonist, Vera Pavlovna, escapes a controlling family, and an arranged marriage, to start a socialist cooperative and a truly egalitarian romantic partnership. She starts a seamstress commune, with shared living quarters, profit-sharing and an on-site school to further the women’s education. Chernyshevsky wrote the novel in response to Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.” He wrote the book while imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress. The book inspired generations of Russian radicals, including the nihilists, anarchists and even many Marxists.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #nihilism #anarchism #communism #chernyshevsky #russia #novel #fiction #Revolutionary #commune #socialism #books #author #writer @bookstadon

📘️Neuerwerbung der Gustav-Landauer-Bibliothek Witten:

Klaus Mathis, Luca Langensand (Hrsg.):

Dignity, Diversity, Anarchy

Proceedings of the Workshops ‘Human Dignity in Europe’ and ‘the Anarchist Critique of the State, the Law and Authority’ Held at the 29th World Congress of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy in Lucerne 2019

The contributions in this volume add innovative insights to the debate on domination, power, dignity and the future of society. Problems of heteronomy are fundamental to the anarchist critique of the principle of domination and at the same time central for the discussion of the concept of human dignity. The debates on dignity and diversity and on anarchist perspectives of domination-free organisation are particularly relevant in view of the softening of traditional power structures and the emergence of new ones, especially in the age of globalisation on the one hand and the resurgence of nationalist concepts on the other hand.

(Source: Franz Steiner Verlag)

#Witten #GLBibW #Dignity #Diversity #Anarchism