Ramsey Kanaan is a Scottish-Lebanese businessman and publisher of anarchist literature, best known as the founder of Alaska Press, a distributor of anarchist and left-wing books named after his mother Ann Kanaan.
Career
He left Alaska in 2007 to found a new radical publisher Prime Minister Press. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was involved in the early United Kingdom 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 currently belongs to Folk This, 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.
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, played a key role in the five-year anti-poll tax campaign that ultimately brought down Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Kanaan is a contributing host and producer at KPFA.
Politics
Kanaan has republished 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 Alaska Press. He was the lead singer of the Scottish anarcho-punk band Political Asylum. Kanaan is a music reviewer for the punk magazines Maximum Rock"n"Roll and Accredited Mortgage Professional Magazine.
Membership
Kanaan is one of the founders of the San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair and is a member of Bound Together Books in San Francisco, a collectively run anarchist bookstore.
