Ramsey Kanaan is a Lebanese-Scottish singer and publisher of anarchist literature, best known as the founder of AK Press, one of the largest distributors of anarchist and left-wing books in the world,[1] named after his mother Ann Kanaan.[2] He left AK in 2007 to found a new radical publisher PM Press.[2][3] He has played an important role in the intellectual life of the US and UK anarchist movements, republishing works of classical anarchist theory by Peter Kropotkin, Alexander Berkman, Rudolf Rocker, Emma Goldman and others, while encouraging the development of contemporary anarchist theory and analysis, such as libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin's Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, which he commissioned for AK Press.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he was involved in the early UK anarcho-punk musical scene, which featured bands including Crass, Conflict, Poison Girls, Rudimentary Peni, The Mob, Zounds, Omega Tribe and Flux of Pink Indians. He was the lead singer of the Scottish anarcho-punk band Political Asylum.[4] He currently belongs to Folk This,[5] a music group which performs folk songs from the past, including from the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the Paris Commune, and hymns and anthems of the Industrial Workers of the World. Kanaan is a music reviewer for the punk magazines Maximum Rock'n'Roll and AMP Magazine.[6]
He was involved in the 1980s and early 1990s in the movement against the poll tax in Britain. Community Resistance, the Edinburgh anarchist group with which Kanaan was an organizer,[7] played a key role in the five-year anti-poll tax campaign that ultimately brought down Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.[8]
Kanaan is one of the founders of the San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair[9] and is a member of Bound Together Books in San Francisco, a collectively run anarchist bookstore.[10] He is married to broadcaster Sasha Lilley, host and founder of Against the Grain, the nationally syndicated radio program of radical ideas originating from Pacifica Radio's KPFA.[11] Kanaan is a contributing host and producer at KPFA Radio[12] and currently resides in Oakland, California.
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