Mob Action Against the State: Collected Speeches from the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair

by Jello Biafra, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Christian Parenti

The Bay Area is rich in local radicals, and most of them have taken a turn at the microphone of the renowned Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. Here's an all-star collection from the speakers' corner of the Jello Biafra, ex-frontman for the punk band Dead Kennedys; Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; author Christian Parenti ( Lockdown America ); author/punk rocker Craig O'Hara ( The Philosophy of Punk ); anti-prison activist/author Ruth Wilson Gilmore ( Golden Gulag ); and Emma Goldman Papers curator Barry Pateman cut loose on anarchism, art, prisons, politics and more, in a relaxed setting.

80 pages, Audio CD

First published July 1, 2002

About the author

Jello Biafra first gained attention as the lead singer and songwriter for San Francisco punk rock band the Dead Kennedys. After his time with the band concluded, he became a political activist and took over the influential record label, Alternative Tentacles, which was founded by him and East Bay Ray. He continued as a musician in numerous collaborations and as a spoken word artist. Politically, he is a member of the Green Party and actively supports progressive political causes. He is a self-proclaimed anarchist who advocates civil disobedience and pranksterism in the name of political change. Biafra is known to use absurdist media tactics in the tradition of the Yippies to highlight issues of civil rights, social justice, and anti-corporatism.

His stage name is a combination of the brand name Jell-O and the name of the short lived country of Biafra which attempted to secede from Nigeria in 1966. After four years of fighting and horrific starvation in Biafra, Nigeria regained control of the nascent Biafran state. Jello Biafra created his name as an ironic combination of a nutritionally poor mass-produced food product and mass starvation. He said he likes how two ideas clash in people's minds.