The Freedom Shop Aotearoa

Just in this month is a box of books from Canada. There are a load of new books and also a heap of old favourites. Below are just a sample... We've got Rebecca Solnit, Arundhati Roy, Gord Hill... Stuff on everyone from the groundbreaking Combahee River Collective to Proudhon, Lucy Parsons, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon to Rosa Luxembourg. Silvia Federici favourites are back in stock and a couple more copies of Tintin: Breaking Free, which won't stay on the shelves for long...

International Prisoners' Justice Day on 10 August is a reminder that we must end the violence of human caging and fight against the world that allows it to exist. When you look at who's in prison in countries around the world, it is so obvious that prisons have been and are tools of colonising empires and capitalism. Prisons are blatant examples of the criminalisation of the indigenous, of the poor, of people identified as 'other' and different by states the world over. In this country the reality of our history of colonisation is laid bare: Māori are vastly over-represented in prison statistics. It is in prisons that the racist and class nature of capitalism is clearly exposed. The fight to end prisons is a fight for a just world. At the Freedom Shop we have some books and zines about prison, including: Hell Is A Very Small Place: Voices From Solitary Confinement by Jean Casella Taking the Rap: Women Doing Time for Society's Crimes by Ann Hansen Hauling Up the Morn...

Disrupt the “ imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy ” power structure was what bell hooks said was needed, and that is what she did. She died this week but her words, her books, and her writings will continue to be part of the tools used to disrupt and dismantle. We need to keep reading and listening to those words, and discussing them - they are powerful. At the Freedom Shop we have two zines with bell hooks' writing: one is ' Understanding Patriarchy ' and the other is an anthology we created ourselves: " bell hooks - a sample of writings by bell hooks to entice... ' We put together the anthology several years ago to try and ensure more people become keen to sample bell hooks' writings. The zine includes three articles: ' Teaching to Transgress: Paulo Freire ', ' Killing Rage: Militant Resistance ' and ' Feminist Class Struggle '. Killing Rage opens with the wonderful sentence, ' I am writing this essay sitting besid...

Congratulations to the winners of this year's Ockham book awards, especially Airini Beautrais (top fiction award for Bug Week & Other Stories ), Tusiata Avia (top poetry award for The Savage Coloniser Book) and Jackson Niewland (best first book of poetry for I am a Human Being )! We have Tusiata's and Airini's books (plus one of Airini's earlier books: Dear Neil Roberts) available in the Freedom Shop, Jackson's book is available at Food Court Books on Constable St. They deserve reading and sharing.

We have just received some hard-to-get books by the African-American feminist author bell hooks . Check them out: (The books were shipped back in November and have spent two months in quarantine, so they are safe to read).

2020 has been full of death and grief, and one more person has died. In the first week of September, David Graeber, anarchist, author, activist, anthropologist and historian, died suddenly.  Graeber's books included: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory , which first started off as an article in Strike! Magazine , Debt: The First 5000 Years , and Direct Action: An Ethnography , plus The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy . He was also one of the editors of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Transformation . Just one quick online search reveals so many journals and articles by Graeber, inlcuding in Rolling Thunder The Shock of Victory: An Analysis of Our Unclaimed Triumphs - there are also books due to be published later this year, including one co-written with his partner ' What are Kings '.    “Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent ine...

2020 has been full of death and grief, and one more person has died. In the first week of September, David Graeber, anarchist, author, activist, anthropologist and historian, died suddenly.  Graeber's books included: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory , which first started off as an article in Strike! Magazine , Debt: The First 5000 Years , and Direct Action: An Ethnography , plus The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy . He was also one of the editors of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Transformation . Just one quick online search reveals so many journals and articles by Graeber, inlcuding in Rolling Thunder The Shock of Victory: An Analysis of Our Unclaimed Triumphs - there are also books due to be published later this year, including one co-written with his partner ' What are Kings '.    “Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent in...

Our latest book order has arrived. Apart from a view classics like Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth and texts that are relevant to the BLM movement, we also have more from local publishers Bridget Williams Books and Little Island Press . Here are a few titles.     

Our latest book order has arrived. Apart from a view classics like Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth and texts that are relevant to the BLM movement, we also have more from local publishers Bridget Williams Books and Little Island Press . Here are a few titles.     

The fightback that erupted in the usa after the murder of George Floyd didn't just come from nowhere. There had been resistance before and there had been many, many deaths before. One of these deaths was in 2012 when Trayvon Martin was killed, it was after the acquittal of his murderer that #BlackLivesMatter came into being. The usa has never been the ‘land of the free’ or the democracy it ever claimed to be; the usa is founded on slavery and genocide of First Nation peoples. It is a settler colonial nation & a hyper-consumer capitalist country based on super inequality and racism. Freedom is a Constant Struggle Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement The fightback that erupted after the killing of George Floyd is a response to the dehumanisation of people. It is a reaction to the violence of capitalism. Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence BlackLife Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom We Want Freedom A Life in the Black Panther Party Writing on...

The fightback that erupted in the usa after the murder of George Floyd didn't just come from nowhere. There had been resistance before and there had been many, many deaths before. One of these deaths was in 2012 when Trayvon Martin was killed, it was after the acquittal of his murderer that #BlackLivesMatter came into being. The usa has never been the ‘land of the free’ or the democracy it ever claimed to be; the usa is founded on slavery and genocide of First Nation peoples. It is a settler colonial nation & a hyper-consumer capitalist country based on super inequality and racism. Freedom is a Constant Struggle Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement The fightback that erupted after the killing of George Floyd is a response to the dehumanisation of people. It is a reaction to the violence of capitalism. Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence BlackLife Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom We Want Freedom A Life in the Black Panther Party Writing on...