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On Our Own Authority! Publishing (OooA!) is a volunteer-run radical publishing house based in Atlanta, Georgia, founded in 2012. We publish intellectual history, social movement history, and studies of global political thought, emphasizing themes of anarchism, anti-colonialism, direct democracy, and workers’ self-management.

Below is our current list of available books (arranged in no particular order). Check out our online bookstore for more information.
Currently, our online bookstore can only process payments from credit/debit card holders living in the United States. Customers who live outside the US, please email your order to oooabooks@gmail.com and we will send you an electronic invoice that includes international shipping rates. Thank you for supporting independent publishing!

Scars of Bondage

by Tchaiko Kwayana & Eusi Kwayana
Banned and confiscated upon its initial publication in Guyana in 1973, this groundbreaking study of slavery by Tchaiko and Eusi Kwayana was eventually republished there twenty-five years later, but, until now, it has never been published in North America. In this remarkable work, the authors explore the social and economic violence visited upon Africans in Guyana from the period of enslavement to emancipation and the self-organized establishment of collectivized villages by Africans after emancipation—fourteen years before the Communist Manifesto was written!
This newly expanded 50th anniversary edition includes the complete original text, Eusi Kwayana’s afterword to the 1998 Guyana edition, a new foreword by Modibo Kadalie, and several appendices of insightful supplemental material, including an essay on the 1763 Berbice Revolution, two recent speeches by Eusi Kwayana, and a fascinating transcribed conversation between Eusi Kwayana and William C. Anderson.
$24.00Order Online

Intimate Direct Democracy

by Modibo Kadalie
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, many African people who were enslaved in North America emancipated themselves and fled into vast swamplands and across colonial borders, beyond the reach of oppressive settler-colonialism and the institution of slavery. On the peripheries of empire, these freedom-seeking "maroons" established their own autonomous, ethnically diverse, and intimately democratic communities of resistance.
This new volume from Modibo Kadalie offers a critical reexamination of the history and historiography surrounding two sites of African maroonage: The Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina; and Fort Mose in Florida.
In these communities of refuge, deep-rooted directly democratic social movements emanating from West Africa converged with those of indigenous North Americans. Kadalie's study of these sites offers a new lens of "intimate direct democracy," through which readers are invited to re-examine their notions of human social history.
$19.99
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"All Will Be Equalized!"

by Andrew Zonneveld
Since the early 1500s, the land we now call Georgia has been a site of dynamic social struggle, where generations of freedom seekers have fought back against the inhumanities of slavery and colonialism. From rebellious Afro-Indigenous and Seminole communities of the Sea Islands and Okefenokee Swamp, to inter-racial networks of anti-Confederate resistance during the U.S. Civil War, these are the stories of oppressed peoples of African, Indigenous, and European descent who lived and fought together for their collective liberation while building multi-racial and directly democratic communities within Georgia's most remote and secluded natural landscapes.

"Zonneveld's work [. . .] reclaims the remote and excluded corners of Georgia’s formative centuries, spanning almost four hundred years from the pre-colonial period until the emergence of Jim Crow apartheid."
— From the Foreword by Modibo Kadalie, author of Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom.
$25.00 Order Online

Pan-African Social Ecology

by Modibo Kadalie
Modibo Kadalie has spent nearly six decades as an activist, organizer, teacher, and scholar in the ongoing struggle for Pan-African freedom. In this collection of interviews and public talks, he reflects on the sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, urban rebellions, and anticolonialist movements that have animated the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Kadalie demonstrates how forms of directly democratic organizing that have evolved through these freedom struggles also present the promise of a ecological future. In so doing, he explains that direct democracy is the key to both Black liberation and ecological security. This concise, radical, and iconoclastic book calls on present and future generations of activists to reconnect with the spirit of these movements without lionizing individual leaders or lending legitimacy to any government or politician.
$14.99Order Online

Why Anarchists Don't Vote

Edited by Nani Ferreira-Mathews & Andrew Zonneveld
COMING SOON! Pre-order today! This collection of classic writings highlights and explains the anarchists' enduring critique of electoralism and representative government. Featuring writings by Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Kotoku Shusui, a poem by Voltairine De Cleyre, and an afterword by Cindy Milstein.
$14.99Order Online

The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics

by Eusi Kwayana
“Every man is his own leader and we are leaderless” — this was the organizational principle voiced by the Afro-Guyanese bauxite mine workers in the democratic councils and mass assemblies that characterized the bauxite strike of April 1970. Originally published in 1972, Eusi Kwayana’s The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics examines the struggle for workers’ control in what was Guyana’s soon-to-be-nationalized bauxite industry. Kwayana’s account of these events underscores the workers’ conviction that “nationalization without workers’ control and workers’ self-management is a fraud.”
Over thirty leaflets, pamphlets, essays, editorials, and journalistic articles have been transcribed and reprinted in this volume, documenting the struggle for workers’ self-emancipation in Guyana from the bauxite strike of 1970 to the sugar workers’ rebellion of 1974.
“A must-read for all who are thinking about the rebuilding of a global Left movement.” — Paget Henry, author of Caliban’s Reason.
$14.99 Order Online

Black Liberation and Palestine Solidarity

by Lenni Brenner and Matthew Quest
A collection of selected essays by Lenni Brenner and Matthew Quest that discusses the historical response of African American freedom movements to the colonial settler state of Israel and its role in American Imperialism in the Middle East.
Among other topics and controversies, these essays provide independent analysis of Stokely Carmichael, James Forman, the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Harold Cruse, the Nation of Islam, Israel’s relationship to Apartheid South Africa, and the recent conflict between Alice Walker and the Anti-Defamation League.
“An informative, incisive, and essential historical analysis of the African American freedom movement’s solidarity with Palestine.” — Michael Letwin, co-founder of Labor for Palestine and Jews for Palestinian Right of Return.
$14.99 Order Online

The Commune: Paris, 1871

by Louise Michel, et al. On 18 March 1871, enormous sections of the Parisian working class began a rebellion that shook the foundations of European society. The Commune: Paris, 1871 is a new collection of classic anarchist and libertarian-socialist studies of the Paris Commune uprising.
This concise volume includes critical reflections on the Commune from such radical authors as Louise Michel, William Morris, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Voltairine de Cleyre, Alexander Berkman and Maurice Brinton.
$14.99 Order Online

How Queer!

edited by Faith Beauchemin
How Queer!: Personal narratives from bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, sexually fluid and other non-monosexual perspectives, gathers together fourteen autobiographical essays written not by sociologists or professional activists, but by ordinary bisexual, pansexual, and sexually-fluid people. These writers come from diverse backgrounds, but their personal narratives explore overarching themes of non-monosexual visibility, activism, confrontation with homophobia and religious bias, and endlessly double-edged experiences in the LGBTQ community.
These stories help bring understanding to anyone who wants to learn more about gender and sexual identity—whether to help define their own journey, to grow their own awareness, or to build solidarity with one another.
$14.99 Order Online

Lay Down Your Arms

by Ole Birk Laursen
A collection of essays from a diverse group of writers originally published in the Dutch anti-militarist journal, "De Wapens Neder" (1935). Through their writing, these anarchist and socialist writers from Europe, Algeria, India, Japan, and the United States connected the struggles against fascism and imperialism in East Asia and Europe with anti-colonial struggles in India and Africa and the African American civil rights movement in the United States. This collection demonstrates the international scope and reach of anarchist and socialist anti-militarism in the 1930s. Includes writings from Hendrik Jan Mispelblom Beyer, Magdeleine Paz, Saïl Mohamed, Lyonel Florant, Aron van Dam, Han Kuijsten, M. P. T. Acharya, and E. K. Nobushima.
$11.99Order Online

Chris Braithwaite: Mariner, Renegade, & Castaway

by Christian Høgsbjerg
Chris Braithwaite (aka Chris Jones) was a black Barbadian seafearer who became a leading organiser of colonial seafearers in inter-war Britain. He played a critical role in the Pan-Africanist and wider anti-colonial movement alongside figures such as C.L.R. James and George Padmore. Historian Christian Høgsbjerg's concise biography recovers Braithwaite’s long over-looked life as a black radical and political trade-unionist, and suggests his determined struggle for working class unity in the face of racism and austerity retains relevance for us today.
"Christian Høgsbjerg’s 'biography from below' of West Indian seaman Chris Braithwaite opens a portal onto an dynamic Black and Red Atlantic world of work and politics. Here is an excellent contribution to a “people’s history of the sea." Marcus Rediker, author of The Amistad Rebellion
$11.99 Order Online

Birthright?

by Nani Ferreira-Mathews
In 2013, author-activist Nani Ferreira-Mathews participated in a popular free ten-day “birthright” trip to Israel offered by the Taglit-Birthright organization in an effort to explore and reconnect with her Jewish heritage. This day- to-day account of the daily programs, activities, and dating games—as well as the tour guides’ stubborn refusal to discuss or even acknowledge Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories—reveals an agenda animated by racism, heterosexism, colonialism, and militaristic nationalism. Drawing upon her experience as a person of both indigenous Hawaiian and Jewish heritage, Ferreira-Mathews interrogates the meaning of “birthright” within a settler-colonialist nation where national identity is so fundamentally invested in the systematic displacement of native peoples.
$14.99Order Online

Organization & Spontaneity

by Kimathi Mohammed
Kimathi Mohammed’s Organization & Spontaneity, originally published in 1974, is a response to key contradictions of the late 1960s and early 1970s Black freedom movements that emphasizes the self-organization of ordinary African Americans and their liberating, self-directed activism.
“In every country today the masses are still violently opposed to the forces of oppression and exploitation.…And it has been the total refusal of the mass of the mass of populations to be governed by an oppressive system which has made revolution possible.” — Kimathi Mohammed, Organization & Spontaneity.
$15.00 Order Online

The Labor Movement in Japan

by Sen Katayama
Japan’s labor movement in the early twentieth century was one of the most vibrant and tumultuous periods in global social history. In their struggles for freedom, Japanese workers organized strikes, initiated riots, and planned imperial assassinations. Small groups of radical socialists and anarchists struggled to survive under extreme state suppression, mass arrests, and political executions. Sen Katayama, a founding figure in the Asian and Asian-American radical traditions, documents this history in his book, The Labor Movement in Japan.
“The life and career of Sen Katayama represented an incredible odyssey. Pioneer social worker, labor organizer, and leader in Japan’s radical political movement . . . Katayama wrote his important book, The Labor Movement in Japan, while in the U.S. in 1918. Unfortunately this study has been out of print for many years. We now have Robert Sabatino and Andrew Zonneveld to thank for making it available once more. Students of left-wing politics in Japan will find it a major source on the early twentieth century labor struggle.” — F.G. Notehelfer, author of Kōtoku Shusui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical.
$14.99 Order Online

Jean Vigo and the Anarchist Eye

by David Weir
The son of Miguel Almereyda, an anarchist activist who died in prison, Jean Vigo kept faith with the politics of his father through his art. One of the most influential filmmakers in cinema history, Vigo gave aesthetic expression to anarchist ideology in four films: the city symphony À propos de Nice (1930), the sports documentary Taris ou la natation (1931), the medium-length Zéro de conduite (1933), and the feature-length L’Atalante (1934), currently ranked by the British Film Institute as the twelfth greatest film of all time. Although his career was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 29, Jean Vigo continues to be one of the most commanding figures in the history of cinema.
In this book, David Weir examines Vigo’s cinematic career in both the political and the cultural context of the interwar period in European history, taking stock of the ideological upheavals of the 1930s that plunged the continent into the horrors of fascism and war. Weir also explores Vigo’s relationship to other filmmakers of the period, such as Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, and Marcel Carné—all of whom, like Vigo, range across the leftist spectrum of the interwar years. In the end, Weir argues that, whereas L’Atalante and the other films have been mostly restored to something like their original condition, more work needs to be done to restore the original ideological meaning of those films.
$14.99
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Lynch Law in Georgia & Other Writings

by Ida B. Wells
Lynch Law in Georgia & Other Writings is a collection of often neglected anti-lynching pamphlets by Ida B. Wells, the most dynamic anti-lynching activist in American History. Newly edited and introduced by historian Matthew Quest, this important collection of Ida B. Wells’s 1899-1920 anti-lynching pamphlets reflects a transition toward viewing lynchings as attacks on the potential of insurgent Black workers who defended and organized themselves for emancipation.
“Ida B. Wells offers a model of radical intellectual activism that a new generation needs to know about.…Lynch Law in Georgia and Other Writings brings forward again the work of a Black woman activist who provided leadership for a number of allied struggles for women’s rights and Black human rights.” — Carole Boyce Davies, author of Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
$19.99 Order Online

Workers' Self-Management in the Caribbean

by Joseph Edwards
Joseph Edwards (born George Myers, also known as Fundi, the “Caribbean Situationist”) was a Jamaican refrigeration mechanic and labor organizer from West Kingston. Edwards led a wildcat strike and workers’ council at Western Meat Packers in Westmoreland, and was a major organizer of the Unemployed Workers Council and Independent Trade Union Advisory Council. A profound critic of electoral party politics and trade union hierarchy, Edwards was among the most proletarian theorists of his generation. His pamphlets, written in the 1970s and ’80s, survey attempts to organize workers in banana and sugar cane fields, bauxite mines, clerical offices, and industrial factories. His unique writing is animated by a Rastafarian-influenced philosophy of history and direct democratic politics that emphasize the role of workers’ and village councils in Caribbean class struggle. The first published collection of writings by Joseph Edwards, Workers Self-Management in the Caribbean transforms how we understand class struggle during Caribbean New Left generation.
$14.99Order Online

To Remain Silent Is Impossible

by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
This new volume collects selected writings by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman that recount their experiences while exiled in Russia from 1920 to 1922. Famous essays like “Bolsheviks Shooting Anarchists,” “The Prisons of Russia,” and “There Is No Communism in Russia” are collected here alongside immortal pamphlets like The Crushing of the Russian Revolution, The Russian Tragedy, and The Kronstadt Rebellion.
$20.00 Order Online

Zionism In the Age of the Dictators

by Lenni Brenner
Lenni Brenner has been an anti-war and anti-racist activist since the early 1950s. Originally published in 1983, Brenner’s famous book documents the interactions between the Zionist movement and the rise of Fascism in Europe during the first half of the 20th century, and clarifies that Zionist colonialism has no legitimate historical claim to anti-racism or anti-fascism. The 2014 edition of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators features a new Afterword by the author.
“Short, crisp, and carefully documented. Mr Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where Zionists collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes, including Hitler’s.” – Edward Mortimer, The Times (London) “Brenner reviews the efforts of the Jewish establishment of the war years to play down, even to conceal, reports of the camps in Europe for fear of inciting anti-semitism at home.” – David Lan, London Review of Books
$22.00 Order Online

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