Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Anonymous - April 2018: one hundred year anniversary of the beginning of Bolshevik terror

 

at 4/16/24 7:26pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: April 2018: one hundred year anniversary of the beginning of Bolshevik terrorDate: April 2018Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20181023132448/https://anarchistnews.org/content/april-2018-one-hundred-year-anniversary-beginning-bolshevik-terror It's April 1918. On the 12th, the Cheka unleashes a ferocious assault on 26 anarchist locales in Moscow, killing dozens and arresting 500. The political situation this repressive operation goes down in is extremely important. The second revolution occurred only half a year ago. Since then, the Bolshevik party has achieved the bureaucratic control of the soviets through four layers of committees and councils, each one more removed than the last from the power and participation of the working class and peasants. The supreme council, the Sovnarkom, is led by Lenin himself, and his power is legitimated by delegates elected by delegates elected by delegates. Among this new class of professional politicians, the Bolsheviks predominate, even though they do not constitute a majority in the population of the country. Since imposing bureaucratic control, the new State has made a series of unpopular decisions. Among them, the creation of the Cheka, a secret police force modeled in large part on the Tsarist Okhrana and led by a tsarist aristocrat turned Bolshevik: Felix Dzerzhinsky. Another is their suppression of the Constituent Assembly after they failed to win a majority in the elections. And most disastrously of all, in March 1918, they sign a humiliating peace with the Axis Powers, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, paying massive reparations and betraying several nations historically oppressed by tsarist Russia, such as the Poles and Ukrainians. Without any input and in total denial of their right to self-determination, Lenin gifts these territories to the German imperialists. All those resources and the cessation of hostilities on the Eastern Front permits Germany to carry on with the mass slaughter of the First World War until the end of the year. The principal victim: the working class and its internationalist movements. There are more consequences: from then on, the movements of national liberation in Poland and Ukraine adopt a decidedly right-wing character. In Ukraine, this leads to pogroms that result in the deaths of thousands of Jews, and in Poland the result is a far-right government that suppresses workers' movements. What's more, the influx of German settlers into these territories creates a direct precedent for the Nazi concept of lebensraum, the land that the German people supposedly needs for its vital expansion. This is a concept that will bear its rotten fruit a couple decades later, during the historically key alliance between Hitler and Stalin. Nearer at hand, the peace treaty that Lenin signs with the imperialists provokes more direct consequences. No one is in favor. There are even many protests from within the Bolshevik party. Besides the liberal and right-wing parties, who want to continue the damned war, the most popular proposal is the one put forward by SRs, anarchists, and also many Bolsheviks, for “neither war nor peace.” According to this proposal, Russia would abandon the imperialist war, breaking its alliance with the democratic states (France, the UK). It would transform the tsarist army into a revolutionary army, organized to pursue guerrilla warfare should the Germany state continue its advances, also fomenting internationalist solidarity among the rank and file of the German army, sparking mutinies that could set off a revolution in central Europe. The rejection of this proposal costs the Bolsheviks a good deal of support among the lower classes. The Socialist Revolutionaries, until that moment their ally, abandon the government, accusing the Bolsheviks of being German agents. Another bit of evidence for their accusation: after the February Revolution (1917), the German secret services smuggled Lenin from his exile in Switzerland to Russia, in the hope that he might help destabilize the enemy state. There is widespread speculation that, with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin is clearing his debt to the German imperialists. In a context of popular rage against the betrayal and the growing authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks, the anarchist organizations—tiny on the eve of the February Revolution but since then ever more influential among the exploited classes—are carrying out an indefatigable propaganda against the new regime. In the face of economic chaos, they propose the direct control of the economy by the workers and peasants, the occupation of factories and the redistribution of the land. They favor the direct exchange of farm goods and city products, organized by the soviets and not by bureaucrats. They propose the abolition of the political parties and of the bureaucratic control of the soviets, as well as the decentralization or federation of the soviet system. They propose the abolition of the aristocratic organization of the military in favor of an egalitarian, revolutionary army, with the direct election of all officers. And in Ukraine, they have already organized such an army, constituted entirely by peasants and workers, subordinated to the political decisions of the soviets, tied to the territory they defend and with a greater gender equality than any other army that exists in the Western world. And this army is accomplishing that which the Bolsheviks could not: they are beating the German imperialists who are invading the territory offered up by Lenin, halting the advance of imperialism and spreading the revolution. ...

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— Anonymous - An Anarchist’s Guide To Dune

 

at 4/16/24 5:09pm

Author: AnonymousTitle: An Anarchist’s Guide To DuneDate: 21 March 2024Source: Retrieved on 16 April 2024 from thetransmetropolitanreview.wordpress.com. There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors. -Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965 Introduction A long time ago in a place called Olympia, Washington, there were a bunch of anarchists, just like today. However, back around 1999, there were certain anarchists of Olympia who enjoyed targeting nasty, ecocidal institutions, burning down ski resorts, freeing captured animals, all that wonderful stuff. Not every anarchist in Olympia was doing this, obviously, but it was fun to know it was happening. Likewise, not every anarchist in Olympia had read the sci-fi novel Dune by Frank Herbert, but those who had were in for a real treat, because the best friend of the late Frank Herbert, a poet named Bill Ransom, was a local Olympia professor who was often found at local Olympia literary events. This might be heresy to say, especially in an article predominantly about Dune, but the trilogy that Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom wrote together, a trilogy which doesn’t even have a proper name, is far superior to the Dune novels. Beginning with The Jesus Incident, the two friends created a colonized world called Pandora (sound familiar?), and on this world, not only is the native life psychotically hostile to the human colonizers, the entire planet, including its plants and animals, posses a singular consciousness. Like the Dune novels, this trilogy examines and dissects both power and religion, but it’s far more kind in its depictions of the guerrilla eco-rebels, those who fight in league with the conscious kelp forests of Pandora. Again, while this might be heresy, Frank Herbert teaming up with a poet certainly made the books much easier to read, and prettier. I first got to Olympia around this time, when the super-fun anarchists were still burning things down, and not only was green-anarchy in the air, not only was deep-ecology a sort of de facto baseline, but having Frank Herbert’s buddy around to discuss ecology and guerrilla warfare with was definitely a treat. Beyond all that, Bill Ransom had served as a humanitarian medic during the civil war in El Salvador, and beyond suffering PTSD from what he experienced, he didn’t talk about guerrilla war lightly, to say the least. Thanks to him, I didn’t just learn all of the above, I was first introduced to the weird literary matrix that existed up there in the woods of Western Washington. Without getting too academic, just imagine a bunch of bored, laid-off white male lumberjacks sitting in their shitty hut with no electricity and no television. Keep in mind, this is the mid 20th century we’re talking about, so in these shitty little huts lit up by kerosene lamp and wood-stove, these fools read a bunch of books in their rainy boredom, and through this they accidentally got real smart, so smart they started holding their own literary readings at local logger bars. And then suddenly, unseen by the rest of the world, working class poets and writers were brawling at readings over things like style and form, inventing their own weird school of writing in the process. I don’t know what you’d call this school, but you probably heard of one example, the 1976 book A River Runs Through It, which became famous after Brad Pitt starred in the 1992 movie version. While that story takes places in Western Montana near Missoula, a lot of people don’t realize that’s the same bio-region as Olympia and Seattle, ecologically speaking. To make it more intense, most people don’t know Idaho is between Montana and Washington. Anyway, the list of while male Pacific Northwest authors goes on, with famous names like lumberjack Ken Kesey of Oregon and his 1962 novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, another movie people might know about. This one’s important, because most of this literary school were white guys, and here we see a prime example of how obsessed they were with the local indigenous, given Cuckoo’s Nest is narrated by Chief Broom. Another example is Raymond Carver, the acclaimed short story writer who was born in Oregon, lived his last days in Port Angeles, Washington, and had several films based on his work. On the other side of the northern Olympic Peninsula is Port Townsend, and it was here that Frank Herbert and his wife Beverly settled down in 1972, living on a farm while Frank began writing Children of Dune, the book that catapulted him to stardom. Frank Herbert was already famous at that point, and the cash from Dune and Dune Messiah allowed him to not only move to Port Townsend, but to give up his day jobs of teaching and journalism. When he was writing the first draft of Dune from 1959 to 1963, his wife Beverly became the main provider for their children. Luckily for them, the first draft of Dune was serialized in the sci-fi magazine Analog, bringing Frank Herbert nearly $3,000, and when the final version of Dune was published in hardcover in 1965, the author was paid just over $7,000. This was a lot of money for Frank, who grew up around Tacoma, Washington living in a shitty hut where he chopped his own wood, smoked his own salmon, and rowed his canoe in the Salish Sea with his indigenous friend. ...

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— A. W. Zurbrugg - Emma Goldman and Reginald Reynolds on Palestine

 

at 4/16/24 4:28pm

Author: A. W. ZurbruggTitle: Emma Goldman and Reginald Reynolds on PalestineSubtitle: Some notes on anti-Semitism and Zionism before World War TwoDate: 24 March 2024Source: Retrieved on 16 April 2024 from anarchiststudies.noblogs.org. However shocking are recent events in and around Gaza, they do not arise like lightning on a clear day and out of blue skies and may be seen in historical context. This text goes a little way towards sketching anarchist perspectives on this historical and political conflict. In the 1930s, and at other times, Anarchists were sympathetic to the concerns of diverse interests and communities in Palestine and commented on developments. Exchanges between Emma Goldman and Reginald Reynolds published in Spain and the World and other texts highlight actual and potential conflicts between long-term residents and new settlers. The situation in Palestine (1920s and 1930s) Anti-Semitism was on the increase before 1939. Some anarchists were not immune. Rudolf Rocker broke with the German anarchist-communists in 1925, when their federation (the FKAD) published Paul Robien’s article ‘Der jüdische Nimbus’, with tropes about ‘Jewish profiteers’, in Der freie Arbeiter.[1] Rocker wrote that such views were intolerable, and that no other anarchist journal would have printed such things.[2] FKAD editors refused to publish his reply. Rocker turned to the journal of the Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands,{1} Der Syndikalist, to print a condemnation: the moment we define national classifications with special and essential features, when we link Jewish exploiters to some particular depravity, at that moment we cease to be anarchists and socialists, and have plainly, with all flags flying defected and placed ourselves in the lager of nationalist and völkisch [folkist/fascist] reaction.[3] Nazi influence was on the rise and was not confined to Germany. Car magnate Henry Ford funded the printing of 500,000 copies of the mendacious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Some 50,000 Jews fled Germany in 1933{2} alone, and a similar total fled over the next two years. Jews attempted to enter neighbouring countries, the Americas and Palestine. Few found any welcome. Zionism had once been viewed as a minority current. Rudolf Rocker had seen it as ‘rather irrelevant’.[4] Le Libertaire (28 August 1924) reported on a conference of the Jewish World Relief Conference (JWRC) held in Czechoslovakia. It noted the presence of anti-Semitism in several countries. It encouraged participation in broad social movements rather than in specific Jewish organisations and regarded the desire for a Jewish nation as an error, defining Zionism as a commercial enterprise, financed by rich tycoons out of self-interest. Jewish workers, it wrote, had to defend the proletariat and its cause against capital. Co-operative ideals prevailed among many settler communities in Palestine. Initially many members of co-operative Jewish colonies were inspired by Gustav Landauer[5] and Kropotkin.[6] Le Libertaire of 22 November 1924 believed that there were revolutionary prospects in Palestine, grounds for high expectations: young Jewish Russians, inspired by idealism, were forming an army of conscious agriculturalists, developing a practical and libertarian communism. However, eight days later another writer in the same paper reported on conflicts and Arab protests after land was purchased by Zionists. Evidently ‘Israelites’ should have the same rights and freedoms as other people: ‘but why should they demand them in Palestine?’ This writer asserted: ‘That is imperialism. Can’t Jews struggle with all oppressed people to conquer freedom here, where they find their freedom contested? This appears to be logical and could avoid many future conflicts.’ Some libertarians located class differences: they might note that between Jewish employers and Jewish employees there was only superficial solidarity; when strikes broke out this solidarity vanished.[7] Some insisted on the possibility of working for mutual understanding with the Arabs.[8] For Sébastien Faure writing in L’Encyclopédie anarchiste in the early 1930s, Jewish migration to Palestine was something that allowed Jewish people both to escape from anti-Semitism and to promote egalitarianism through agricultural collectives; but, through fermenting nationalism, it opened potential new obstacles. Co-operatives were expected to treat people fairly, avoiding discrimination and paying equal wages to all, or if not equal wages, then compensation adjusted for effort and responsibility. There was some admiration for progressive measures, for example their stress on gender equality.[9] The Mexican anarchist journal Verbo Rojo published a text on horrific killings in Palestine in 1929. It noted the progress of Jewish colonisation and commented that Zionism might appear as a solution – a refuge for Jewish people – but these colonies, however prosperous, were surrounded by the hatred of Arab peoples and by open, sordid war. In this view, Zionists of good faith might think that they were resolving the ‘Jewish question’, but, continued this text, there is no Jewish question, rather there is a ‘human question’, what was needed was the liberation of all humanity; the liberation of one race was impossible unless humanity as a whole was liberated. ‘The error of Jewish nationalism is that it is a nationalism, the error of having believed that problems could be solved within patriotic frameworks’, in the form of a state, through a politics of colonisation, which could only have lamentable consequences.[10] ...

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— Daniel Talamantes - Anarchist Kinships in California’s San Gabriel Valley

 

at 4/16/24 3:51pm

Author: Daniel TalamantesTitle: Anarchist Kinships in California’s San Gabriel ValleyDate: 13 March 2024Source: Retrieved on 16 April 2024 from anarchiststudies.org. Early twentieth-century San Gabriel Valley, California was an ideal location for Mexican migrants seeking work opportunities and hoping to escape the Mexican Revolution. Initially, they were seen as a convenient source of labor to fill a void left by the Johnson Reed Act of 1917 which barred migration from the Asia-Pacific zone. They were also seasonal workers, so their integration into communities was not considered threatening by white settlers. But as families joined the migration to California, these Mexican laborers were increasingly segregated from city-centers and Anglo-American neighborhoods into ethnic enclaves. Along with these families came radicals, militants, and political refugees. This included anarchists, Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón, co-founders of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM, 1905-1918), who had migrated to Texas before crossing the United States to Los Angeles where they established their revolutionary journal Regeneración.[1] Here, they connected with the labor organizing efforts of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), already underway in the San Gabriel Valley. And as a result, anarchism became a prevalent current within these migrant communities—a lesser known aspect to Los Angeles history which serves as a powerful counter to the pioneer narrative, still persistent in historical memory. The San Gabriel Mission was situated between the Rio Hondo and Gabriel Rivers in the rich “green belt” bioregion of El Monte and populated for centuries by the Tongva peoples. In the early twentieth century, with the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad, Anglo settlers expelled the remaining members of the tribe, and apportioned extensive acres of land as ranches for the benefit of a handful of white men to raise livestock. Eventually this lead to a formation of a colony, the predecessor of El Monte, which was eventually incorporated as a municipality of Los Angeles in 1912. It became highly lucrative in cash crops, especially walnuts. Despite the popular mythologized pioneer narrative of El Monte—development of agricultural land in the name of “progress;” Jeffersonian liberalism; and the alluring prospect of getting rich during the Gold Rush—in reality, it is a story of settler-colonial opportunism, exploitation, and domination. It is also a story of mutual aid and the importance of family, kinship, and the relational elements of anarchism. In the ephemeral orchards of El Monte’s past are the hauntings and whispering words of revolution and resistance from long-gone itinerant laborers. Along with the legacy of homesteader neighborhoods in present-day El Monte, vestiges of Mexican migrant barrios imprint the urban landscape, now polluted with industrial waste. It was in these neighborhoods, the lacunas of El Monte’s pioneer order, that the PLM and other anarchist mutual aid networks flourished. El Monte’s anarchist history is, in fact, not just regional, Californian, or national, but transnational. With European migrants heavily active, the golden age of anarcho-syndicalism in North America emerged in metropolitan areas of the Eastern United States. While continuing to plot revolution in Europe, anarchists had considerable influence in the labor organizing power of the IWW. It was not until the Magón brothers brought the PLM to the U.S., however, that the real-time battleground of the Mexican Revolution became an important fight for anarchist possibility. According to Ricardo Flores Magón, anarchism “aims at establishing peace forever among all the races of the earth by the suppression of [the] fountain of all evils—the right of private property.”[2] For many anarchists, forming nonhierarchical, mutualistic communities is just as important as labor rights and revolution. Since the colonial era, communities across the globe have endured and suffered innumerable violence(s) including displacement, cultural erasure, enslavement, genocide, and environmental ruin. Migrant peoples were left to seek new opportunities within the very states that displaced them, while also facing exploitation, segregation, policing, and denial of basic humanity. In response to these brutal conditions, migrant communities collectively cultivated ways to support each other—they engaged in mutual aid—as a source of survival. This type of anarchism in practice was not always explicitly called such by these communities. It was an affective anarchy, containing values that are more subtle than other more contentious direct forms of action associated with anarchism—as Kropotkin would argue, because mutual aid is organic. But the PLM also actively existed in the barrios, meeting in houses, conspiring in the fields, and attending rallies in Eastern Los Angeles. As reported in the pages of Regeneración, groups often formed after community events, frequently fundraisers, that served as ways to support PLM propaganda and foster mutual-aid based communities. In these groups there were two constants: first, the groups’ compositions were often familial; and second, a vast majority of members migrated from Mexico. In other words, family formations and kinship networks played a critical role in these local PLM groups—from the more anonymous members of the collectives to the Magón family itself at the Edendale commune (located in what is now known as the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles). ...

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— Luigi Celentano - On Violence and Rebels

 

at 4/16/24 3:33pm

Author: Luigi CelentanoTitle: On Violence and RebelsDate: 17 January 2024Source: Retrieved on 16 April 2024 from anarchiststudies.org. On Wednesday, February 24, 1932, at 1:32 p.m. the car carrying Investigations Police Captain Luis Pardeiro Sontie, driven by the assigned chauffeur José Chebel Seluja, was ambushed at the intersection of Artigas Boulevard and Monte Caseros Street, in downtown Montevideo. The scene looked like mob work: around fifty gunshots fired to assassinate two men. The air smelled of revenge, and no wonder, it was. Capt. Luis Pardeiro was the bête noire of Uruguayan anarchists and, as opposed to what could be expected, his death marked the end of direct-action anarchism in Uruguay, for those responsible would fall, in one way or another, into police hands and brought to bourgeois justice. Most of those anarchists active at the time would be incarcerated, some serving decades behind bars. A year earlier, the last bastions of direct action in Argentina had been killed by firing squad.[1] A few years later, Miguel Arcángel Roscigna would be one of the first “disappeared” in the region—an infamous method that would be resurrected and abused during the dictatorships of the 1970s on both sides of the Río de la Plata. Anarchism in the Río de la Plata region would thus dwindle and fall into oblivion until scholars and a new generation of activists breathed new life into it in the mid- to late nineties. As with Severino Di Giovanni in Argentina,[2] there were men in Uruguay who dared defy all societal standards to push their way forward, with or without a wider organizational approach. Fernando O’Neill Cuesta was himself a man of similar characteristics: an anarchist who served time in prison along with many of the direct-action anarchists of that era due to “some serious acts of bloodshed.”[3] His stint in prison allowed him to establish a relationship with some of Montevideo’s direct-action anarchists serving time, listen to their stories (when they actually spoke about the actions that brought them behind bars), and collect their accounts and recollections of the events in book form, backing up those accounts with newspaper clippings and the actual judicial records of their trials. Profile of the Direct-Action Anarchists Direct-action anarchists[4] tended to be in their late twenties, mostly involved in “clandestine activities” (meaning they had no stable jobs) or some sort of trade (taxi drivers, chauffeurs, bakers, etc.), had only “primary” education (albeit the general level of education in the 1920s and 1930s was rather low),[5] and were mostly single.[6] Also, all of them were men. This is no minor detail: there were no direct-action women in this small universe we are examining. Sociologically, this is very revealing and reflects the situation of the Uruguayan militant woman in the 1920s and 1930s, subject to a markedly sexist cultural context both within and without the anarchist milieu, much in spite of the advancements made in more formal areas such as citizenship.[7] In this regard, there are, however, instances of women who challenged this status quo to break away with the stereotypes attached to them.[8] In the late 1920s and early 1930s, amid world economic stagnation and depression, Uruguay was on its path to industrialization, with a solid economic growth and strong participation by the labor force, propelled by protectionist policies.[9] This rapid growth would last until the post-World War II years, in which the country would sink in a slow and irreversible industrial stall.[10] Although direct-action anarchists did not follow any organizational structure—their actions being sporadic and circumstantial—anarchists in Uruguay did have a strong unifying umbrella that defined their actions: the labor union. Most specifically, the bakers’ union. Workers gathered in “resistance societies” according to trade. The bakers’ union, hence, was called Sociedad de Resistencia de Obreros Panaderos, or Baker Workers Resistance Society. Its leading figure was Abelardo Pita. The Sociedad de Resistencia de Obreros Panaderos was the strongest union during the 1920s and 1930s in Uruguay, followed by that of the taxi drivers, with a high adherence among workers of that trade. It is interesting to note that, despite regular incidents, there was a direct relationship between the bakers’ union and the bosses, one of a “necessary evil”: the union helped unemployed workers find a job, and the bosses turned to the union when they needed new employees. This was, however, by no means a sign of the direct-action anarchists’ acquiescence or a relinquishing of union demands about which they were quite adamant. This commitment is readily evident, for instance, in the correspondence with fellow comrades from Argentina, calls to strike and support of imprisoned comrades (the call for the liberation of Kurt Gustav Wilckens and Pedro Rodríguez Bonaparte are most striking—the latter is one of the arrestees for the Estrella del Norte case, which we will address below), and calls for boycott of different bakeries that dared hire workers (scabs) for night-shift work (underpaid and forbidden by the union). Night-shift work was a thorny issue for bakers and bosses, often the ground for strikes and mass gatherings, where women like Virginia Bolten also took part and lectured. The level of organization and dedication of the bakers’ union was unique. Yet it would be its militants who would fall in disarray and act on their own, carrying violent actions—including murder—in retaliation for breaching a strike or exploitative working conditions by rival union leaders of the “yellow” —or bosses’—union (such is the case of the attacks against Juan España and Antonio Anido, which we will also address below). ...

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— David Goodway - Not protest but direct action

 

at 4/16/24 3:20pm

Author: David GoodwayTitle: Not protest but direct actionSubtitle: Anarchism past and presentDate: 1 March 2012Source: Retrieved on 16 April 2024 from historyandpolicy.org. Executive Summary The media and other commentators in the UK constantly employ 'anarchists' and 'anarchism' as smear words unworthy of rational consideration, yet they refer to a long-established way of looking at the world which has a distinctive and impressive intellectual history. Anarchists disdain the customary use of 'anarchy' to mean 'chaos' or 'complete disorder': for them it signifies the absence of rulers in a self-managed society, more highly organized than the disorganization and chaos of the present. The historic anarchist movement of the late-nineteenth century was therefore distinguished from the rest of the international movement of organised labour by its rejection of state intervention from above in favour of self-organisation from below, as well as by its rejection of constitutional protest in favour of direct action. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 redefined the framework of international labour politics, so that by the 1950s the remaining scattered anarchist groups seemed no more than ghosts of a once vibrant political movement. However, the new and largely youthful social movements originating in the 1960s saw a revival of the influence of anarchism, often unconscious or denied, but also often held as a self-conscious political ideology. Through all these phases of its history the anarchist emphasis on direct action has taken two quite different forms. Firstly, symbolic actions, whether violent or non-violent, but usually illegal, intended as propaganda by the deed: attempts to inspire wider popular revolt. Secondly, the building of institutions in the present which prefigure those which will exist in a post-revolutionary society (for example the occupation and running of factories, or the following of exemplary Green lifestyles), intended as demonstrations of the possibility of by-passing the existing social order. Self-conscious anarchists who have taken part in recent demonstrations against globalisation or cuts in state spending are therefore not attempting to influence official policy making: their aim is rather to influence their fellow citizens to reject all forms of authority from above and replace it with self-governing, cooperative associations built up from below. Introduction Fifty to sixty years ago anarchism appeared to be a spent force, as both a movement and a political theory, yet since the 1960s there has been a resurgence in Europe and North America of anarchist ideas and practice. Britain nowadays must have a greater number of conscious anarchists than at any previous point in its history. In addition there are many more who, while not identifying themselves as anarchists, think and behave in significantly anarchist ways. The last fifteen years has also seen the rise of the anti-globalization or anti-capitalism movement. At a series of international meetings of the key organizations that determine the global economic order - notably, the World Trade Organization at Seattle in 1999, the G8 at Genoa in 2001 and most recently the G20 in London in 2009 - minorities of self-professed anarchists have gone on the rampage, capturing the attention not just of the civil authorities but of the world's press, radio and television. To this extent the anarchists have announced their return as a significant disruptive presence, once again inspiring anxiety among governments and police chiefs. Anarchists themselves disdain the customary use of 'anarchy' to mean 'chaos' or 'complete disorder'. For them it signifies the absence of a ruler or rulers in a self-managed society, usually resembling the 'co-operative commonwealth' that most socialists have traditionally sought, and more highly organized than the disorganization and chaos of the present. An anarchist society would be more ordered since the political theory of anarchism advocates organization from the bottom up with the federation of the self-governed entities - as opposed to order being imposed from the top down upon resisting individuals or groups. This is a long-established way of looking at things, with not just a distinctive but an impressive intellectual history. Yet the media and other commentators (including many who should know better) insist on employing 'anarchists' and 'anarchism' as smear words unworthy of rational consideration. The French anarchists' cult of dynamite in the 1890s had much to answer for the exceedingly negative image throughout the twentieth century. Now, in contemporary Britain, recent anarchist mayhem on the streets leads to a lazy, or frightened, association of all violent actions with 'anarchists', such as the unrelated student demonstration of November 2010 or the widespread urban rioting of August 2011, neither of which had any identifiable anarchist component. The problem may be essentially British since, unlike France, Italy or Spain, this country has had no experience of a mass anarchist movement or an established anarchist tradition. The purpose of this paper, then, is to go some way towards filling this gap in the UK's historical memory by providing an introductory international survey of both the historic anarchist movement and the very different anarchist revival. ...

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— David Goodway - Anarchism and the welfare state

 

at 4/16/24 2:59pm

Author: David GoodwayTitle: Anarchism and the welfare stateSubtitle: The Peckham Health CentreDate: 1 May 2007Source: Retrieved on 16 April 2024 from historyandpolicy.org. Executive Summary Anarchists are normally regarded as a fringe element in British public life but they did engage with mainstream economic, medical and health issues, especially around what they saw as the exemplary experiment of the Peckham Health Centre in the 1930s and 1940s. Soon after the Centre's launch, private donations enabled the construction of a specially-designed building to promote healthy activity: including a day nursery, play area, theatre, cafeteria, gymnasium and one of the largest swimming pools in London. Participation was open to local families who were prepared to pay a small weekly subscription: consequently they felt it was a club which belonged to them, not an outside charity. Its internal organisation was based on real autonomy: people were allowed to make their own decisions about medical treatment and members were encouraged to set up their own activities using the Centre's resources. However, it was closed down on the establishment of the National Health Service because it focused on health not illness, required membership contributions and encouraged too much independence. This is only one among many examples of the loss of local self-organisation and mutual aid in the face of the increasing centralisation and top-down professionalism of the British welfare state both before but especially after 1945. It deserves to be remembered and reconsidered as a valid alternative model - as, indeed does the anarchist tradition more generally. Introduction Anarchists reject the state not only in the status quo but also as the means to a free society, which they envisage as a network of co-operative associations, organized from the bottom upwards and freely federated. Although they advocate the elimination of poverty and the support of the sick and the aged by their fellows, their hostility to statism extends to the welfare state, arguing that it perpetuates poverty and illness, destroys the working-class's institutions of mutual aid and fosters dependency and servility. Anarchism has never been taken seriously in Britain, although it is a long-established political position and ideology, associated with a substantial body of radical thought. In other countries, such as France and Italy, this is taken for granted and intellectual respect paid to anarchism, even if very much a minority tradition, whereas in Britain and the other Anglo-Saxon nations it continues to be shunned in polite circles, whether social or academic, and assigned a pariah status. Yet there has been a distinguished anarchist - or left-libertarian, if one requires a less emotive term - tradition in Britain stretching from William Morris, Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde, through John Cowper Powys, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, to Alex Comfort, E.P. Thompson, Christopher Pallis and Colin Ward, and which I discuss in Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow. But this is a predominantly literary lineage, at most concerned with the visual arts and education, with little engagement with such fundamental matters as economics and finance, industry and agriculture, or indeed medicine, health and welfare. When Kropotkin moved to England in 1886 he founded Freedom along with indigenous collaborators, yet the British movement was so weak that the paper folded in 1927. It was the Spanish Revolution of 1936 and ensuing Civil War that were largely responsible for some revival of interest in anarchism in Britain and the formation of a renewed Freedom Press Group. Spain and the World was launched by Vero Recchioni, the 21-year-old son of an old Italian anarchist militant, one of Errico Malatesta's comrades, who had settled in London in the 1890s. Recchioni, who had been expelled from France the previous year for anti-Fascist activity, had promptly anglicized his name to Vernon Richards and begun publication of his first paper, Free Italy / Italia Libera, in collaboration with the Italian anarchist intellectual, Camillo Berneri, then in exile in Paris and who was to be assassinated in Barcelona in 1937, almost certainly by Communists. Berneri's daughter, Marie Louise (originally Maria Luisa), also outstandingly gifted, left France to live with Richards in London (until her tragically premature death in 1949 at the age of 31). With the Nationalist victory Spain and the World became Revolt! for six issues, being succeeded for the duration of the Second World War by War Commentary, which reverted in 1945 to the famous old title of Freedom - and as such has enjoyed uninterrupted publication down to the present day. It was Marie Louise Berneri who was said to have been 'the principal theoretical influence' behind War Commentary and Freedom; and she and Richards were at the centre of the new group of energetic young anarchists that had emerged around Spain and the World, to be joined in the 1940s by a South London GP, John Hewetson, Tony Gibson (who was to become a psychologist), the writer and historian of anarchism, George Woodcock, and Colin Ward, now the best - although still too little - known member of the group. ...

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— Tommy Lawson - Co-operatives or class struggle?

 

at 4/16/24 2:27pm

Author: Tommy LawsonTitle: Co-operatives or class struggle?Date: 28 August 2023Source: Retrieved on 16 April 2024 from redblacknotes.com. Every so often the question of co-operatives is raised in the revolutionary socialist movement. Optimistic positions suggest that co-ops can form the basis for replacing capitalism with a new economy based on solidarity and labour where workers have ‘control’ and even suggest they are a vital part of revolutionary strategy. These positions have both contemporary and historical antecedents and the arguments still continue. However the positive features of cooperatives are still no replacement for revolutionary strategy and building working class power against capitalism. Debates over the role of cooperatives in revolutionary strategy can be traced back to the 1850s and the First International when Mutualists like Pierre Joseph Proudhon and the Communard Charles Beslay advocated co-operative based economies. They believed that as workers accumulated their own funds and invested them together co-operatives could slowly come to replace individually owned capitalist enterprises. While they proposed a variety of schemes to make this come to fruition, the reality was that capital could not be adjusted to serve the working class. The Mutualists reformist positions were challenged by people like Joseph Dejacque and Eugene Varlin, who understood that capital must be confronted and overthrown by militant, armed working class struggle. In Australia today the main cooperative enterprise enthusiasts point to is Earthworker. Earthworker makes ‘renewable energy appliances and components’ and sees itself as ‘part of ensuring a just transition for communities affected by the move from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy…’ This is at least true of the initial Earthworker project, which took over a factory that was shut following the end of the coal power industry in the LaTrobe Valley, Victoria. Earthworker has since expanded into cleaning services and is open to expanding into new projects. Earthworker notes that they ‘believe social and environmental exploitation are intertwined, and that the problems of climate change, job insecurity and growing inequality must be tackled simultaneously, through greater grassroots economic ownership.’ However the question must be asked just how far ‘greater grassroots economic ownership’ reaches against the gigantic power of the fossil fuel industry and international corporations. The power of a few workers united in a small enterprise pales against organised labour, the only force capable of reckoning with capital. Historically even when workers pool their resources and attempt to create ‘alternative’ economies these end up either failing or being forced to adapt to traditional business practices in order to be competitive. None of this is to disparage the efforts nor the people involved in an enterprise like Earthworker. The birth of Earthworker was an organic response to the loss of jobs and filling an open niche in the market. But parts of the radical left in Australia and its support for cooperatives still has to be critiqued. In Victorian Socialists latest program, the section on ‘Workers and Unions’ presents a policy that aims to ‘introduce measures that encourage worker control and participation in decision making in the workplace..’ via legal reforms that ensure workers receive governance rights, a share of profits and the additional measure of imposing higher payroll taxes on non-cooperative businesses. They would also offer tax concessions to cooperatives encouraging them as the ‘normalised form of private enterprise’. As though the working class benefits from private enterprise and more competition![1] Market socialism may result from an imperfect or aborted attempt at revolution, but it is not something to be actively fought for. Such ideas are really irrelevant in the current context of economics and class struggle. Capitalism has already developed such immense productive forces that a future revolution should take seriously the task of abolishing production for exchange value. Commodities produced for a market still require the worker to be subject to the lack of rational planning. As a result they must ‘discipline’ themselves by accepting wage cuts and increases in the intensity of work in order to maintain a competitive status on the market. Even if these decisions are taken democratically there is no real overturning of capitalist relations. As Karl Marx noted in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, co-operatives, established in struggle by the conquest of capitalist enterprises have ‘value only insofar as they are the independent creation of the workers and not proteges of either the government or bourgeoise’. Thus, a transitional programme of a political party that wants to integrate workers into the management of the state and capitalist economics is not revolutionary. In an 1897 article in the newspaper L’Agitazione “the experimental anarchist colonies” Errico Malatesta also noted the contradiction that those living or working in co-operative relations must necessarily discipline themselves in order to maintain profit, thus supplying cheap labour to the market which undercuts the rest of the proletariat. ...

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— Mother Earth - Observations and Comments on War Chauvinism

 

at 4/15/24 8:40am

Author: Mother EarthTitle: Observations and Comments on War ChauvinismDate: 1914Notes: Untitled excerpt from the 'Observations and Comments' section of 'Mother Earth', October 1914, New York City, published by Emma Goldman, edited by Alexander BerkmanSource: Retrieved on April 15, 2024 from mgouldhawke.wordpress.com The attitude of the Socialists of Europe in the present war would be a master stroke of the God of Hoax were the situation not so terribly tragic. The Social Democrats of Germany have been solemnly assured by the Kaiser that Germany is merely defending itself against encroaching Czarism. Therefore the Socialist members of Parliament vote in favor of the war budget, give their wholehearted co-operation to the Kaiser’s army, and support him in invading Luxemburg and Belgium. The French Socialists join hands with “their” government to defend “their” republic against Prussian militarism supported by four millions of German Socialists. Guesde and Sembat enter the war ministry and make common cause with — the Czar, the enemy of German militarism, The Socialists of England, indignant at the invasion of Belgium, come to the rescue of — the Czar. The revolutionists of Russia, fearful of any harm that might come to the precious culture of Czarism from the Socialist defenders of Prussian militarism, become “enthusiastically united” with the government of the Romanoffs. It is, then, Prussian militarism against the Russian Knout. In other words, the Socialist millions of Germany slaughtering their brother Socialists in France, England and Russia, for the benefit of — whom? Such is the madness of war that tries to banish the devil by feeding the fires of hell. * * * The American Socialists are quite confused as to what attitude to take toward the war. Of course, their prophet has said, “Workers of all countries, unite!” But, then, their practical models, the German Social Democrats, are supporting the Kaiser. Again, Marx said the workers have nothing to lose but their chains. Why, then, should they fear an invader or defend “their” country? Oh, but Marx evidently forgot that the Party might lose votes by taking an unpopular stand on a vital matter! What’s to be done? The spokesmen of American Socialism rush into print to cry with one voice: “Of course, we believe in internationalism and solidarity; but — if the Socialists of Europe are just now murdering each other for Kaiser or Czar, reserve your judgment, please. We are sure they will explain everything satisfactorily afterwards.” And the good party sheep say Amen. * * * No less tragic is the undeniable fact that even some Anarchists, who might have been expected to remain loyal to internationalism, have also been infected by the virus of chauvinism. Some of them favor “defending the higher civilizations” against Prussian militarism. Others argue that it was "the right and duty” of Belgium to repel the foreign invader, and that they therefore sympathize with the Allies. Both arguments are superficial and fallacious. Prussian militarism cannot be destroyed by the military power of other countries. Such a method must lead to national bitterness, thoughts of revenge, increased armaments and future wars. The German people themselves – no one else – can free Germany from the curse of militarism. And as to a nation's “duty to repel the invader" — as H.K. argues in the Modern School — it is an attitude that voices bourgeois conceptions of national boundary lines and slavish "honor." The Belgium workers had nothing to lose by the Germans passing through “their” country. But they lost thousands of lives by trying to keep the German boots off the sacred precincts of their masters' land. And if the "invader," while passing through Belgium, had tried to provision his army, had the Belgian workers anything to lose by it? Why should they defend the property of their Belgian exploiters against the foreign expropriators? Indeed, the sight of the Germans expropriating the property of the Belgian bourgeoisie might have served the Belgian workers as an example worthy of emulation. We have no sympathy whatever with the “libertarians” — be they Socialists, Anarchists or what not — whose philosophic internationalism somersaults into rankest chauvinism the moment it is put to the practical test.

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— Jan Willem Stutje, Emanuela Minuto and Constance Bantman - Charismatic Leadership and Networks in Anarchism

 

at 4/14/24 4:04pm

Author: Jan Willem Stutje, Emanuela Minuto and Constance BantmanTitle: Charismatic Leadership and Networks in AnarchismSubtitle: The Cases of Pietro Gori and Jean GraveDate: 6 December 2017Source: International Review of Social History Volume 62, Issue 3; pp. 421-423, DOI:10.1017/S0020859017000335 (Stutje); pp. 425-450, DOI:10.1017/S0020859017000359 (Minuto); pp. 451-477, DOI:10.1017/S0020859017000347 (Bantman). An Introductory Note (Jan Willem Stutje) The terms “Marxist” and “Marxism” have a problematic history. Their use raised questions as early as the 1870s, when Bakunin coined the terms in his polemic against the supposedly vanity-driven “leader” Karl Marx. By labelling Marx’s supporters “Marxists”, the Russian anarchist created the impression that they were slavishly subjecting themselves to Marx, a painful suggestion that the egalitarian early communists, already mistrustful of the personification of movements, felt even more keenly. Their mistrust illustrated the scepticism engendered by an emphasis on leaders and leadership, even in the early years of the labour movement. In the historiography of social movements, too, opposition to the idea of researching the role of the individual was both long evident and deep-seated. There was an understandable desire not to succumb to the “great man” theory of history, the course of which was to be explained instead in terms of the relationships and conflicts between social forces. Furthermore, for many years academic theory accepted the ideology of the major traditional mass organizations of the European left. The only leadership to be tolerated was one that within the social struggle still endeavoured to defend bureaucratic forms of organization, so that the sort of centralized leadership examined in that context largely reproduced the development of the organizations themselves. The leadership was as it were the personification of a not especially fertile starting point for it to consider its own specific role and development. Even when formal centralized mass organizations gave way to more decentralized networks, the degree of interest shown in leadership was scarcely any greater. Charisma and populism were phenomena believed to originate in the irrationality of mainly right-wing radical movements that were out to deceive; Fremdkörper, which, left-wing movements believed, manifested themselves only in the non-Western variants of authoritarian movements operated by the petty middle class and peasants who were attracted to socialism. Charismatic leadership especially, with its promise of redemption, remained suspect; it was an obstacle to self-liberation. In more libertarian circles, that suspicion became a particular hindrance to historians’ theorizing leadership in general and charismatic leadership in particular. It is only over the past fifteen years that progress has been made in the study of charismatic leadership within the labour movement,[1] primarily by substantiating Max Weber’s theory of charismatic leadership by drawing on specific historical examples.[2] It is gratifying to see that the present issue of the International Review of Social History is perpetuating this still frail tradition with studies on the leadership of two renowned anarchist figures from the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century: the Italian Pietro Gori (1865–1911) and the Frenchman Jean Grave (1854–1939). Emanuela Minuto, a political scientist at the University of Pisa and a specialist in Italian anarchism, quite rightly emphasizes that charisma is not an objective ahistorical quality of the person concerned. Rather, it is an out-of-the-ordinary quality attributed to him by his followers, making it appear to them that he was “sent by God” or endowed with something “supernatural or superhuman”. The qualities of a natural leader are, in fact, founded in the interaction between leaders and followers,[3] and it is fascinating to see how Minuto operationalizes such an ambiguous concept by emphasizing Gori’s emotional style of communication. Indeed, during an episode of major political and social upheaval in Italy in 1897–1898, Gori created a sense of self-awareness and involvement among a following passionately keen to find a way out of the crisis. His style of communication was actually at its most effective in emergent movements lacking any great deal of central organization. Similar observations have been made elsewhere, too, applied to the cases of Ferdinand Lassalle in Germany, the Dutchman Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Jean Jaurès in France, and the British socialist James Keir Hardy, among others. Like Gori, they, too, had the religious charisma of the saviour and prophet. They also sought the theatre of the street, in protests and demonstrations, in debates, at funerals, during judicial hearings; situations where no appeal could be made to inherited prestige and where, through their Christian metaphor and symbolism, they could forge a link with popular tradition. Whereas Gori became famous as the charismatic leader of an organized social anarchist movement through his powerful emotional style of communication, the French anarchist Jean Grave owed his influence to his role as newspaper publisher and editor, especially of Les Temps Nouveaux (1895–1922), successor by turns to Le Révolté (1879–1885) and La Révolte (1887–1894). Unlike Gori, who the repression in Italy often forced into exile – in London, for example (1895), or the US (1895–1896) and Argentina (1898–1901) – the Frenchman seldom left his editorial offices in Rue de Mouffetard in Paris’s Latin Quarter. While in his involvement in the labour struggle and campaigning for civil rights Gori personally sought contact with ordinary, often illiterate people, and managed to win their hearts and minds (andare al popolo), the more retiring Grave used the printed word to disseminate the anarchist message, and, until World War I, the former shoemaker was an influential figure in the international socialist movement, and in the 1890s an ideologue of anarchosyndicalism. ...

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— Carmen Cañete Quesada - Gitanos during the war (1936–1939)

 

at 4/14/24 3:22pm

Author: Carmen Cañete QuesadaTitle: Gitanos during the war (1936–1939)Date: 2020Notes: Excerpted from “The memory of Spanish Gypsies: Scholarship, oral history, and archive research” Romani Studies 5, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2020), 15–47. ISSN 1528–0748 (print); 1757–2274 (online). doi: doi.orgSource: Retrieved on 8th April 2024 from www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk Tracking down scholarly material about the Gitanos during the turbulent years of the war is a difficult task. However, it is possible to collect information on this theme by consulting journals and magazines that took an active role in reporting during the war. Today, the identification of these documents using databases and their accessibility through virtual newspaper archives has greatly facilitated the work of researchers. Of special interest to those attempting to locate material of the Gitano people reported during the war is the Hemeroteca Virtual de la Biblioteca Nacional de España (Virtual Newspaper Archive of the National Library in Spain) which today counts 2,411 titles and exceeds 68 million pages for public consultation. A significant amount of news on the Gypsy people using this and other digital sources can be found in Mundo Gráfico. An overall review of this weekly magazine alerts the reader to the progressive agenda that the magazine follows, leading to its censorship during Primo de Rivera’s regime, and its support for the Second Republic during the war. Mundo Gráfico continued actively during the two first years of the battle, although with limited circulation due to paper shortages. In December 1938, the magazine closed its doors to the public, but prior to that several graphic reports on Gypsies offered substantial information and large-sized illustrative photos. As an illustration, on 12 August 1936, Antonio Otero Seco dedicated three pages of the magazine to the Gypsy bullfighter, Rafael “El Gallo,” Rafael “the Cock,” (1936b: 13–15); and a news clip from 9 December paid tribute to the Gypsy painter from Jaén, Fabián de Castro, who was interviewed from his residence in France (1936d: 12). Other entries by the same reporter inform the reader on the whereabouts of the Gitanos at the beginning of the war. On 28 October 1936, Otero Seco photographed a group of male and female Gitanos waiting in the building of the Ministerio de Guerra (Ministry of War) to obtain a laissez-passer to be able to circulate out of Madrid while the capital was being bombed. The report’s aim was to interact (and persuade) the reader that the Gitanos are on the side of the pueblo (the people) and, as such, they salute the reporter with their fists raised (Otero Seco 1936c: 10). The article includes some war anecdotes with members of the Gypsy community as protagonists. A Gitano from Cerro Muriano (Córdoba) being persuaded by a captain to join the militiamen makes his decision based on the following previous clarification: “¿De qué lao cae la Guardia sivil?” [What side do the Civil Guard fight for?] and having been told that the police force sided with Franco, he responds: “Pues entonces, venga un fusil” [So then, give me a rifle] (Otero Seco 1936c: 10). An exceptional war incident with a Gitano man was also written about and published in Mundo Gráfico and La Voz. José Palma León, also knows as “Oselito,” was the son of a poor Gitano locksmith. He invented a means of transportation and a new sport, which entailed using as a vehicle a large, heavy oxcart metal ring of more than 50 kg, which allowed him to travel at the speed of 17 km per hour. Oselito had developed this skill out of necessity, as in his youth he was given the task of delivering these oxcart-wheel rings to customers of his father. Given the practical difficulty involved in such a task, his solution was to walk, and then run, inside the wheel in order to get himself and the wheel from place to place more efficiently. He gained local fame and was determined to participate in the Olimpiada Popular (Popular Olympics), an alternative Olympic game to the Nazi celebrations, to be held in Barcelona starting on 19 July 1936, although this was cancelled due to the outbreak of war. The report of the event is carefully made and includes images of Oselito traveling in his aro (ring) as he arrived in the capital of Madrid. Coincidentally, the news appeared two days after the assassination of the monarchic deputy, Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, and two days before the military coup. In the news from 15 October 1937, in La Voz, Otero Seco reports Oselito’s death. He includes a picture of this extraordinary Gitano in the Sierra of Madrid holding the ring and carrying a gun (1937b: 4).[1] A further example is Helios Gómez who used the rifle and the brush in unison to levy attacks upon the war’s enemy. Originally from the quarter of Triana (Seville), this artist joined the leales in Barcelona, Aragon, and the Balearic Islands, all the while producing paintings and war posters favouring the democratic side. He was appointed Political Commissar of the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) (General Workers Union), designed the masthead and artwork of the newspaper El Frente, and organized an exhibition in homage to the anarchist Buenaventura Durruti in Barcelona. Exiled to France after the war, Gómez was sent to concentration camps in Argelès-sur-Mer, Bram, and Vernet d’Ariège, and then was deported to the French camp in Djelfa (Algeria) between February 1939 and May 1942. Between 1945–1946 and 1948–1954, Gómez was arrested and imprisoned in the Modelo prison in Barcelona, where he painted the oratory known as the Capilla Gitana. Sadly, he died just two years later.[2] ...

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— Emma Goldman and Mariano R. Vázquez - The Fall of Barcelona

 

at 4/14/24 3:11pm

Author: Emma Goldman and Mariano R. VázquezTitle: The Fall of BarcelonaSubtitle: Letters exchanged by Emma Goldman and Mariano R. Vázquez after the Spanish Civil WarDate: February-March 1939Notes: These letters were exchanged by Emma Goldman, foreign representative of the CNT-FAI in London, and Mariano R. Vázquez, Secretary General of the CNT in February and March 1939. Following the fall of Catalonia, hundreds of thousands of Spanish republicans fled the fascist regime of Francisco Franco. The letters between Goldman and Vázquez discuss the plight of these refugees and how to aid them. They also debate the causes of the Republican defeat, with Goldman blaming the communist-backed government of Juan Negrín and Vázquez engaging in self-criticism about the fault of the CNT-FAI in prosecuting the revolution and discouraging foreign support.Source: Transcribed from the Emma Goldman papers and Rudolf Rocker papers, archived by the International Institute of Social History. Goldman to Vázquez, 5 February 1939 Dear comrade Mariano R. Vázquez, Knowing through Martin and Souchy that you and the other comrades have left Barcelona, our unhappy Barcelona, has not ended my anxiety. And since yesterday, the terrible crimes of Girona have increased my anxiety. If only I knew what to do to help you in this tragic hour. But as I don’t know if you are safe and where, I feel completely helpless. I am afraid that this letter will not reach you, but I am sending it to comrade Roca in Paris; he is very trustworthy. I am sure if there is a chance, he will send it to you. Do me the favour, dear comrade, of telling me if there is anything you want me to do and also tell me which of the comrades could be saved from Franco’s brutality. Martin told me that your companion was with you but I didn’t know if you also had your beautiful girl with you. I am so anxious for her, her as for all our comrades. I hope with all my heart that you will write to me. I assure you of my sympathies and my comradely devotion at this hour, I am not only of sympathy but of desire to help you. Fraternally, Emma Goldman Vázquez to Goldman, 13 February 1939 Dear Friend, Comrade Roca handed me your letter of the 5th. I hasten to answer and am sorry I could not do so sooner to liberate you from your anxiety. I left Barcelona a few hours before the enemy took her. On Wednesday, 25th of January at 9p.m. I called on the people of Barcelona over the radio. It was the last time. Some hours later the enemy dominated Barcelona, city of our struggles, our joy and… We have saved all the comrades, because in the end we succeeded in making them open the frontier. But almost all of them are in concentration camps. I am not, because I fled. The fundamental problem and our greatest preoccupation at present is to find out in which countries we can place our militancy, those hundreds of comrades who, in Spain, would be shot by Franco. On this basis I am working; we have already achieved something, but there is much work to be done yet. I do not know concretely in which way you can be useful to us, after what I told you about our main preoccupation. It only occurs to me that you should go on your propaganda tour through Canada. I am convinced that it will be interesting from a moral as well as material point of view, because it may be a financial success and you will understand how much we are in need of money to meet all the many necessities which present themselves, especially when it comes to organize the journey of the comrades to America. As I do believe that it will be impossible to place a single militant in England, and that one can collect but little money there, I advise you to go to Canada. You will no doubt, see yourself what else you can do within this idea of placing comrades in any possible country, and of collecting money to help the militants in exile and their wives and children, and to meet the journey expenses. This is all I can tell you for the moment. Write to me c/o Roca, he will forward the letter to me. The life in the concentration camps is very hard and they put everybody in, as they don’t want to arrange anybody’s papers. I could not do it myself yet. Embraces, Mariano R. Vázquez. Goldman to Vázquez, 16 February 1939 Dear comrade Mariano. I cannot tell you how glad I was to hear from you at last. I knew that you had escaped the hell of the concentration camps, but I did not know where you are and what the plans of the CNT are as far as you are now in a position to make plan. You say nothing your letter about your companion and your lovely daughter I met in the school. Are they safe, and do you know how many of the members of the CNT-FAI committees have been able to get into France? I understand the old, deaf and crippled comrade Gonzalo Reparey had been completely forgotten and is already in the hands of Franco. I wonder whether this is true. My heart bleeds for those who could not get away, and for all of the refugees who are so abominably treated by the French authorities. I am preparing an article about this as well as the contemptible part played by England in helping Franco to Menorca and now like a vulture falling over the agonised bodies of the Spanish people in rushing to recognise Franco, this after thirty months of hypocritical pretenses that the non-intervention pact was for “humanitarian reasons”. All capitalist countries are of course alike, but England is the most unscrupulous when it comes to serve her Imperialist interests. Unfortunately the British workers have drunk that unscrupulousness from their mother’s breast. Dear comrade you have said nothing in your letter of the real forces that compelled you and the other comrades of the CNT-FAI to give up the defense of Barcelona. I wish you would write me the exact reasons as everybody in England and the States are completely at a loss to account for the surrender. If you do not want the reason published you have but to let me know. But for my own peace of mind I really ought to know. I fear that it was the Negrín Communist allies of yours who have played you false. Already when I was in Barcelona last I had a feeling that in the crucial moment you of the CNT will be betrayed and left to your own devices. You once told Martin that I was always suspicious or afraid of your allies. There was no need of either since it was too obvious that neither Negrín or his colleagues would stand by the CNT in time of grave danger. I fear it was your own sterling honesty and your child like belief in the need of working with the government which brought about the final debacle. Please do not take offense. It is my deep interest and abiding faith in you which makes me tell you frankly that you were duped by the miserable Negrín and Communist gang who hated the CNT-FAI as much as the Fascists. However, if you can give me the reasons that led up to the fall of Barcelona you will help me greatly and also the other comrades who have done whatever they could to help your struggle since it began. ...

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— Stuart White - Making anarchism respectable?

 

at 4/14/24 2:52pm

Author: Stuart WhiteTitle: Making anarchism respectable?Subtitle: The social philosophy of Colin WardDate: February 2007Source: Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2007), 12(1), 11–28. <cyberdandy.org> ABSTRACT Anarchism suffers from a respectability deficit, a problem of achieving a threshold level of credibility in the eyes of non-anarchists. One anarchist thinker who has grappled persistently with this problem over 60 years of activism is the influential post-war British anarchist, Colin Ward. Responding directly to the respectability deficit, Ward helped to develop a ‘pragmatist’ anarchism characterized by direct engagement with urgent social problems. The paper explains the nature of this pragmatist anarchism, and places it in its historical intellectual context. It discusses how far Ward has indeed succeeded in producing a social philosophy that is at once genuinely anarchist and ‘intellectually respectable’. My theme in this symposium ... is ‘are we respectable enough?’, and in asking this question I am not concerned about the way we dress, or whether our private lives conform to a statistical norm, or how we earn our living, but with the quality of our anarchist ideas: are our ideas worthy of respect? (Colin Ward, Anarchism and Respectability, 1961) Introduction[1] In his essay, ‘Revolution and Reason’, Herbert Read recounts being asked by a Conservative MP at a formal dinner what his politics were. When he replied ‘I am an anarchist’, ‘she cried, “How absurd!”, and did not address another word to me during the whole meal’.[2] While Read was perhaps somewhat exceptional in being an anarchist who dines alongside Conservative MPs, his experience nevertheless points to a familiar problem for anarchists: achieving a threshold level of credibility in the eyes of the vast majority of non-anarchists. Undoubtedly, anarchism has long suffered from wide misunderstanding, associated, unfairly, with pathological preferences for chaos and violence. But even amongst political theorists, anarchism is usually dismissed as little more than theoretical curiosity, a philosophy which pushes widely shared ideals of freedom and equality to an implausible extreme. While political theorists might be willing to concede that anarchic societies, or approximations of them, are possible in some circumstances,[3] the overwhelmingly dominant view is that the ideal of an anarchic society has little or no relevance to modern industrial, or post-industrial, societies. So the question is posed: Is anarchism a respectable social philosophy? Can it be made so? One post-war British anarchist who has been exercised by this challenge, over 60 years of untiring activism, is Colin Ward. ‘[I]t is ... a question’, he writes, of persuading people to ‘treat anarchism as something more than a joke, or an “interesting” intellectual attitude’.[4] This paper attempts to explain the nature of Ward’s anarchism and to assess its claim to respectability. As we shall see, Ward’s response to the challenge presents a somewhat different conception of anarchism to that which informs much of the philosophical commentary on anarchist thought, although it is nevertheless one which has clear antecedents in the historic anarchist movement as well as considerable contemporary resonance. I begin by setting out the main elements of, and influences on, Ward’s ‘pragmatist’ anarchism. I then look at how Ward applies this anarchism to a specific social problem, housing, and clarify the relationship between Ward’s anarchism and the anarcho-communism of Kropotkin. I consider, and rebut, the criticism from within the anarchist movement that Ward seeks respectability for his ideas by effectively abandoning anarchism. I discuss the attraction which Ward’s ideas have had to the wider left and society—for Ward, a key test of achieving anarchist respectability. 1. ‘Pragmatist’ anarchism Ward came into the anarchist movement in the 1940s, joining the editorial team of the main British anarchist newspaper, Freedom, in 1947.[5] To many at this time anarchism’s prospects must have seemed hopeless, particularly given the recent, emphatic defeat of revolutionary anarchism in Spain. What could it mean to be an anarchist in the second half of the twentieth century? Ward, along with some other Freedom anarchists, began to develop an answer to this question in the 1950s. In place of an ‘apocalyptic’ anarchism which seeks ‘all or nothing at all’, Ward advanced the idea of a ‘pragmatist’ anarchism which seeks ‘in Martin Buber’s words, ... to fashion a new community “wholly in the present, out of the recalcitrant material of our own day”’.[6] Some of the ideas that would feed into the development of Ward’s pragmatist anarchism were set out in Britain by writers such as Herbert Read and Alex Comfort in the immediate post-war years. Another important influence from the United States was the journal politics, and in particular its sometime contributor, Paul Goodman.[7] But new opportunities for pragmatist anarchism were opened up in the second half of the 1950s as a result of the emergence of the first New Left. Referring to New Leftists such as E.P. Thompson, Ward wrote that: ‘These people are groping for the solutions which we, from an anarchist background, ought to be propounding’.[8] Pessimistic that this potential opening to the wider left could be seized within the format of a weekly newspaper, and clearly impressed by the example of the recently launched New Left Review, Ward pressed within the Freedom group at the turn of the decade for the establishment of a monthly journal which would be able to explore anarchist thinking in more depth.[9] The result, Anarchy, ran from 1961 to 1970 under Ward’s editorship.[10] After stepping down from editorship of Anarchy, Ward developed his pragmatist perspective further in a range of books covering education, social history and specific policy issues. His Anarchy in Action, first published in 1973, but drawing on material that appeared earlier in Anarchy and Freedom, is perhaps the most influential overall statement of pragmatist anarchist thought.[11] ...

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— Carl Nold - A Reminiscence of Alexander Berkman

 

at 4/14/24 2:41pm

Author: Carl NoldTitle: A Reminiscence of Alexander BerkmanDate: July 25, 1897Source: The Firebrand vol. 3 nos. 25–26 Much has been said, from diverse quarters, regarding Alexander Berkman and his deed, yet he himself, for obvious reasons, has not been heard. In the following I venture to give his sentiments concerning his action, as he gave them to me in the first year of our prison life. For several days succeeding Berkman’s arrest, he, Berkman, remained in ignorance concerning the physical condition of Frick. When it transpired that Frick would recover, it seemed to him that this circumstance, purely accidental as it was, would not tend to produce any minimizing effect on the signification and importance of his act, for a deed, such as his, that is its meaning, does in no way depend upon the physical consequences, but must have for its criterion the purpose underlying the deed, and should be estimated according to the moral effect, called propaganda, produced by such an act. As far as his purpose and aim were concerned, it mattered very little whether the shots were fatal or not; indeed, viewed from the true anarchistic standpoint it did not make the slightest difference what the outcome, the physical results were. Berkman had no personal axes to grind, no personal wrongs to avenge, no private feelings to satisfy. It might popularly be supposed that the object of the attempt was to remove an obnoxious person; yet nothing could be further from the real purpose. It was Berkman’s aim, first and last, to express by his deed his sentiments towards the existing system of legal oppression and industrial despotism; to attack the institution of wageslavery in the person of one of its most prominent representatives; to give it a blow—rather morally than physically—this was the real purpose and signification of hie act. The Anarchists are misrepresented, libelled, caricatured and—very little understood. They are represented as arch enemies of society, murderers, and lunatics. But did it ever occur to the believing public to inquire why the enemies of society should, of their own free will, subject themselves to all the inconveniences and dangers arising from unfavorable public sentiments; why they should willfully and willingly risk their liberty and enjoyment of life and even sacrifice their very lives as they often do in pursuance of—what—? Insane fancies, utopias, phantasmagoria? ls it lunacy to wish to make the world better? Insane fancy to work and hope for a more just and rational condition of affairs? Is it utopian to desire freedom and the enjoyment of life for every human being? Are Socialists and Anarchists enemies of Society because they think the world could be improved upon and every man, woman and child made free and happy? It this is lunacy and a sign of enmity towards society, then Anarchists are indeed criminal lunatics. But is it? The History of Darkness records the names of men whose “genius” devastated whole countries, ruined its people and caused the death of thousands upon thousands of human beings, in order to demonstrate their imaginary right to a disputed claim of a hole in the ground somewhere in Asia; it immortalizes the names and records of men who waged war upon their neighbors because they were weak or strong; it tells us of other men who unsparingly sacrificed human life while trying to convince the world that one is three and three is one; or that bread is flesh and wine is blood, and many, other disputed questions of “equal importance”. The History of Light, on the other hand, tells us of men whose life’s sole ambition was to make the world better, to disipate the shadows of ignorance and disseminate the seeds of knowledge, to raise the curtain of darkness and let the beautiful rays of light carry its vivifying warmth into tho human heart. They were men of genius and they, too, waged war; war against darkness and despotism, against ignorance and slavery. And when human life was sacrificed in these wars, it was only out of necessity, to insure the happiness of the many at the cost of the few. And because humanity was dearer to these men than their princes, because they thought more of the people, their rights and liberties, than of the strength of the throne, they were persecuted and punished. They were proclaimed enemies of the nation, traitors to their country and its interests, murderers and brigands and were treated accordingly—until they had gathered strength enough to come out of the struggle as victors. With success came recognition and now the names of the lunatics of 1793 and of the traitors of 1776 are held in sacred memory, and the men that had fallen under the hoofs of tyranny are regarded as martyrs to humanity. And who shall say that the lunatics and social enemies of our day will not, in time, be successful and prove themselves pioneers of light and freedom? But you say it is lunacy to revolutionize the world by an individual revolutionary deed. So it is; and what is more, no revolutionist of modern times—be he Anarchist, Socialist or Nihilist—ever expected the reconstruction of society to follow upon the heels of his deed. ...

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— Santbir Singh Pannu - An Anarcha-Sikhī Manifesto

 

at 4/14/24 7:00am

Author: Santbir Singh PannuTitle: An Anarcha-Sikhī ManifestoDate: 2021Notes: Excerpted from The Divine Light of Anarchy: A Socio-Political Analysis of Conflicting Sikh Historical Narratives, pp. 183–186.Source: Retrieved on 14th April 2024 from yorkspace.library.yorku.ca Anarcha-Sikhī is anti-authoritarian. While the Gurū is the master of all Sikhs, the nature of the Gurū in a post-1699 and 1708 world means that there neither is—nor should there be—any one authoritative figure in the Sikh community when it comes to social and political matters (Singh, J., 2006, pp. 111–113). Instead, the Bāṇī is Gurū, and the Ḵẖālsā are Gurū. Both of these are abstract concepts and do not signify a specific individual. The Bāṇī refers to Gurū Granth Sāhib, a text that maintains its authority over Sikhs by building a loving and devotional connection with the poetry contained within. The Ḵẖālsā, or the Sikhs who have pledged allegiance to the Panth and have been born again into the House of Nānak, is a force that is greater than the sum of its parts. If the Ḵẖālsā is anti-authoritarian, how does it make decisions? Sikh history and tradition point to two different models of decision-making in the Sikh tradition. The first is the Pañj Piāra system and the second is the Sarbat Ḵẖālsā methodology (Singh, J., 2006, pp. 163–166). Anarcha-Sikhī is feminist. Women are not just a fundamental part of the Ḵẖālsā Panth, but as Mātā Jīto (Sundarī)’s role in the first Vaisākhī demonstrates, the Ḵẖālsā Panth would not exist without women. Creating space and acknowledging the presence of Sikh women is but an anemic first step. Instead, Sikh history and ideology must be reclaimed and the feminist principles of Sikhī need to be highlighted (Singh, N., 1993). Stories of Sikh women have often been erased from Sikh history, as in Bhangu’s text, even prominent Sikh women disappear from historical events. For example, the seventh Gurū, Gurū Har Rai Sāhib, had an adopted daughter named Rūp Kaur (sometimes written as Sarūp Kaur or Harrūp Kaur). Gurū Har Rai Sāhib ensured that his daughter was well educated, and she became a scholar. Sikh history tells us that she became a historian and wrote down early Sikh history. While we know she wrote history, none of her texts have survived.[1] She is but one instance of the stories of Sikh women who are erased. This historic erasure of Sikh women continues into the present day, where far too many Sikh spaces are still monopolized by men. Traditional power structures are almost all male, and leadership from the community level to the Panthik level are usually always male. The recent Farmer’s Protest has demonstrated the power, vitality and force of Sikh women (Shergill, 2020; Bhowmick, 2021; Kaur & Sekhon, 2021). Anarcha-Sikhī seeks a Panth where feminism ensures that women have the space and opportunity to fulfill all roles in the community. Anarcha-Sikhī is anti-casteist and anti-racist. Too much of Sikh history, and of current Sikhī, is dominated by a few powerful castes, with other groups marginalized in the community (Judge, 2015, pp. 63–64). This is counter to the basic principles of the Ḵẖālsā, and of Gurū Nānak Sāhib’s ideology (Dhamoon & Sian, 2020, p. 52). Anarcha-Sikhī is built on anti-casteism and anti-racism, but at the same time, the reality of caste and race and historical marginalization is not ignored. Anarcha-Sikhī is queer positive. LGBTQ Sikhs have been erased from Sikh history, and are also severely marginalized in contemporary Sikhī (Dhamoon & Sian, 2020, p. 49). Anarcha-Sikhī seeks to build space with LGBTQ Sikhs to take their place within the community, and share their much needed perspective and opinions. Anarcha-Sikhī is anti-colonial. It confronts the question of how to practice a sovereign tradition on sovereign land stolen from other nations (Dhamoon & Sian, 2020, pp. 54–55). It commits to being an ally and supporting respectful space for Indigenous folks to undergo resurgence on their own terms (Simpson, 2011, p. 86). It endeavours to practice anti-colonialism on a day to day basis. It works “towards a new vision and way of being a good guest” on sovereign land (Mucina, 2019, p. 41). Anarcha-Sikhī, like most, if not all forms of anarchism, is anti-state. Anarcha-Sikhī believes that the only legitimate state is the state created by the Gurū (Singh, J., 2006, pp. 212–213). Anarcha-Sikhī believes that this state is fundamentally non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian and egalitarian in its practice. This is not a real physical state, but a state of mind, carried within the mind and heart of every member of the Ḵẖālsā. If any physical state runs counter to the divine order of the Gurū it becomes a Sikh’s obligation to resist it. However, historically, the Ḵẖālsā did create a state; the Sarkār-ī-Ḵẖālsā (government of the Ḵẖālsā) commonly known as the Sikh Kingdom, Sikh Empire or the Lahore Darbār. The Sarkār-ī-Ḵẖālsā was led by a monarch.[2] So then, how can Sikhī claim to be anti-statist and anti-authoritarian? Anarcha-Sikhī would argue that Ranjīt Singh’s capture of power and consolidation of the Misls in the late 18th century was an act that ran counter to Sikh ethics and ideology (Singh, B., 1993, p. 190–196). The Sikh Empire was not the ideal Sikh state, instead it was the early Misl period (from the 1730’s to the 1760’s) that best exemplified Anarcha-Sikhī principles. This was an era of no formal governance systems where an anti-elitist method of decision making through the principle of consensus was utilized. Governance was not a structured affair, but instead involved a periodic gathering of the people for community-based decision making. Such a system of governance needed a strong foundation of anti-authoritarian and egalitarian principles on which to develop from. The 240 year history of the Sikhs, from Gurū Nanak Sāhib to the Ḵẖālsā, provided these principles. ...

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— Anonymous - The Next Eclipse

 

at 4/13/24 7:04am

Author: AnonymousTitle: The Next EclipseSubtitle: A Vision for Regional AutonomyDate: 2018Source: Retrieved on July 25th, 2018 from https://thenexteclipse.wordpress.com/. An invitation and a challenge The Next Eclipse is an invitation to shift our perspective on southern Illinois. Rather than seeing it as a dying region waiting for outside interests to save it, we propose that what makes it special is rooted in its status of being economically overlooked. A better future for this region will be built not by the wealthy or their politicians, and certainly not by more polluting industries, but by everyday people organizing ourselves to build a unique way of living and sustaining the life, history, and struggle of this region. The Next Eclipse is a challenge to build the capacity for regional autonomy in this time between the eclipses. By “autonomy,” we mean the possibility of a life outside the existing economic and political relations, the possibility of a dignified, free, and equal life here in southern Illinois. The Next Eclipse, finally, is a short book that has been passed hand to hand in southern Illinois, its intended audience, and shared over a far broader range. It has inspired others to think about their own regions in new ways, and there are rumors of similar projects in different places. We are currently collecting stories from people who have lived and struggled in Little Egypt. We are interested in stories about a wide variety of topics: subsistence farming, labor struggles, struggles against racism; about fights for the forest; about what you cherish most about life in southern Illiniois. If you would like to share your stories with us, please visit our contact page by clicking here. (https://thenexteclipse.wordpress.com/contact/) vol. 1: The Next Eclipse Preface The following text was written in the weeks before a solar eclipse, the totality of which passed over southern Illinois on August 21th, 2017. In seven years, a second total solar eclipse will be visible from the same place. The two paths of these eclipses make an X across the so-called United States, intersecting in Makanda, IL. The Next Eclipse is the beginning of a vision for regional autonomy, and a challenge to southern Illinois to build the infrastructure for such autonomy in the time between the eclipses. It is an attempt to allow these astronomical events, reduced by local governments and businesses to nothing more than opportunities for tourism, to have some deeper significance for the inhabitants of the region. It has been a pleasant surprise to find that the text has resonated with people in other places as well. Reading groups have formed in a handful of places around the country. We hope that the text inspires the reflections of others in their own regions, as we have been inspired by movements for autonomy around the world. The night before the 2017 eclipse, a march led by musicians took the main strip in Carbondale, IL. A hundred or so people clapped in time and sang “Negra luna [Black moon],” a song from a musical tradition rooted in resistance to colonization. A banner at the front of the march declared “THIS EMPIRE, TOO, WILL BE ECLIPSED.” Since that eclipse, it has become more and more clear that certainties are scarce regarding even the near future. None of us know what seven years’ time will bring. On the short list of certainties, things around which a life can be build, three things stand out: First, it is certain that at 1:59 pm on April 8th, 2024, for 4 minutes and 9 seconds, southern Illinois will fall into darkness in a shadow cast by the moon. Second, it is certain that we owe nothing to the institutions that prolong this empire, and that we owe everything to each other, to those working to retrieve the world from the ecocidal and biocidal clutches of the economy and its government. Finally, it is certain that in the course of time, this empire, like all the others before it, will be eclipsed. Nothing can prepare you for a total solar eclipse. It is worth stopping whatever else you are doing. It is worth traveling great distances for. And it is worth allowing it to take on significance in your life – not merely the dumb movements of rocks and gases, but a moment that reveals, that inspires, that ignites. For life and joy; for freedom, equality, and dignity; for a patient, deep, and sensitive rebellion. Carbondale, IL, February 2018 1. What is an eclipse? In ancient Greek, éklipses meant “the abandonment,” “the downfall,” “a failing or forsaking,” or “the darkening of a heavenly body.” Two of the most pronounced differences of the natural world – day and night – find themselves momentarily confused, reshuffled, paradoxically intertwined. In those moments, all the ranks, badges, and hierarchies that bind the powers of the earth, are revealed for what they are: the stupid games of humans, who have forgotten their place in the mortal order of things. The eclipse reminds us, contrary to the meticulously structured optical illusion of this social system, that it is the sun and not money that breaths life into the inhabitants of earth. The fact that the eclipse has been viewed by the ruling class of the area as a momentary economic manna from heaven only underlines their idiocy, their disconnection from the world. ...

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— Alexander Dunlap - The Direction of Ecological Insurrections

 

at 4/13/24 6:48am

Author: Alexander DunlapTitle: The Direction of Ecological InsurrectionsSubtitle: Political Ecology Comes to Daggers with FukuokaDate: 21 January 2020Notes: Special thanks to the Journal of Political Ecology.Source: Journal of Political Ecology 27(1), 988-1014, doi:10.2458/v27i1.23751 Abstract This article proposes a political ecology of resistance. This is done by putting forward insurrectionary political ecology as a lens of research and struggle, through the confluence of the complementary "political" practice of insurrectionary anarchism and the "ecological" method of "no-till natural farming." While seemingly different, the article argues that these practices are compatible, animating a political ecology of resistance around anti-authoritarian political and ecological lifeways. This direction, or compass, of insurrectionary political ecology is discussed in relation to other autonomous tendencies, as it complements and strengthens existing critical schools of thought heavily influenced by political ecology, such as (decolonial) degrowth, environmental justice and post-development. Insurrectionary political ecology deepens connections with scholarly rebels in political and ecological struggles outside—and rejecting—the university system. The article includes discussions of research ethics, various conceptions of "activism", autonomous tendencies and existing differences between the concepts of "revolution" and "insurrection", in order to debate notions of "counter-hegemony" and "duel-power." The overall purpose here is to offer a theoretical ethos for a political ecology of resistance that invigorates political praxis to subvert the ongoing socio-ecological catastrophes. Keywords: environmental justice, insurrectionary ecology, degrowth, decolonization, post-development, insurrectionary political ecology, resistance 1. Introduction Whether you turn inward or outward, whatever you encounter, kill it! If you meet a Buddha, kill the Buddha; if you meet a Patriarch, kill the Patriarch; if you meet an enlightened being, kill the enlightened being; if you meet your parents, kill your parents; if you meet your relatives, kill your relatives. Only then will you find emancipation, and by not clinging to anything, you will be free wherever you go. — Linji, Chan Buddhist (d. 867) Hurry up, comrade, shoot at once on the policeman, the judge, the wealthy, before a new police will hinder you. Hurry up and say no, before a new repression convinces you that to say no is nonsensical and crazy and that you should accept the hospitality of an asylum. Hurry up and attack the capital, before a new ideology makes it sacred for you. Hurry up and refuse work, before a new sophist tells you: Work makes you free. Hurry up and play. Hurry up and arm yourself. — Alfredo Bonanno, Armed joy (1977) Trying to separate humans from “nature” is as misguided as attempting to separate theory from action. Reconciling these two separations, while altering our socio-political values towards sharing, actively respecting nature and each other[1] is the central individual and collective challenge that humans are currently facing, as the planet plummets towards ecological, climate and pandemic catastrophe. According to the United Nations (UNSDG 2018): “degradation of dry lands has led to the desertification of 3.6 billion hectares”, as “[n]ature across most of the globe has now been significantly altered by multiple human drivers, with the majority of indicators of ecosystems and biodiversity showing rapid decline” (IPBES 2019: 3). The cause, however, is less abstract than climate modeling, statistical data and academic reports would ever acknowledge: it is the values, organization and operation of techno-industrial society itself.[2] It is the production, reproduction and habitual patterns of capitalist development to which many of us have grown so dependent and accustomed. Stopping this one-way ticket to oblivion is the true challenge. Apathy, disinterest and political conformity proliferate, while social media has blossomed as central to (mainstream) oppositional politics within industrial society. This is because, as Seaweed (2013: 19) rightly points out, the “world’s population consists of defeated peoples in this war”, which is “more than just defeated. We are kept: kept in fear, kept in awe, kept out of touch with each other and the earth that gives us life.” Over centuries, people have “internalized much of the values and ideas of the conquerors and have thus been assimilated into the ways of the obedient and the domesticated” (Seaweed 2013: 19; see Gelderloos 2017). The “war” that Seaweed refers to is both an ancient conventional war, but also the ever-present social war designed to disrupt social fabrics, manage subjectivities and assimilate populations into statist and market structures (Gardenyes 2011, 2012; Dunlap 2019a). The “military’s [physical and cultural] infiltration into the movements of daily life”, Paul Virilio (1990 [1978]) explains, “reproduce[s] the metamorphoses of the hunter: from direct confrontation of the wild animal; to progressive control over the movements of certain species; then, with the help of the dog, to guarding semi-wild flocks; and finally to preproduction, breeding” (see also Bædan 2014). To be clear, this is an alienated hunter separated from ecosystem immersion, enacting practices of domination imbued with a logic of the market, or accumulation, which bleeds insecurity, enacting control strategies and systems. Techno-capitalist society has domesticated a civil population, circumscribing self-determination, mediating agency and redirecting initiative through institutional, social and (bio)political arrangements to propel technological and capitalist development. Riots breaks out and (autonomous) space is captured for moments or months, yet the struggle to maintain and transform this space remains a challenge. How does the burned down Wendy’s[3] transform into a community garden? By dispensing new qualities of food and social relationships, as opposed to fast food. ...

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— Alexander Dunlap - Recognizing the “De” in Degrowth

 

at 4/13/24 6:39am

Author: Alexander DunlapTitle: Recognizing the “De” in DegrowthSubtitle: An Anarchist and Autonomist Engagement with DegrowthDate: December 2, 2020Notes: This was originally published at Undisciplined Environments (sans preface).Source: <https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2020/12/02/recognizing-the-de-in-degrowth/> Preface Does degrowth have any relevance to anarchism? Taking an academic and popular public stance against capitalist growth or, more accurately, the degrowing total material and energy throughput of techno-capitalism is extremely relevant to anarchism, green or otherwise. Degrowth, in theory, is a natural companion of anarchism and other anti-capitalist autonomist tendencies, with direct linkages through authors such as Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul. Yet where is degrowth in practice? Do degrowthers join the riots against police repression or, more relevant and discussed below, the combative ecological struggles to stop capitalist growth? If they stand by watching, is it with condemnation, support or a righteous criticism that the rioters should be making community gardens? These dispositions matter and some positions are easier to take than others. A phenomenon with a long intellectual history (e.g. Andre Gorz; Cornelius Castoriadis; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen; Sergio Latouche) that arose from the anti-globalization movement, it has actually remained rather marginal or inconsequential in struggles to defend habitats and maintain autonomous spaces. Meanwhile, degrowth has become a booming academic topic, slowly taking over the halls of universities with an enormous amount of academic articles, books and special issues. In fact, degrowth has now created an important space within universities, yet what is the quality of this space and how is this space experienced by so-called “militants”? While degrowth intellectuals have made great efforts to connect degrowth with environmental justice movements (Akbulut et al., 2019) and direct action (Treu et al., 2020), ambiguity reigns regarding politics and qualities of direct action. This coincides with an implicit academic conflation of environmental justice with all land and territorial struggles logged into the Environmental Justice Atlas (https://ejatlas.org/), which lumps in armed action with vandalism and arson. The interface of direct action and academic labelling is murky, and maybe rightfully so, yet how does environmental justice speak with or—more concerning—for to all the indigenous, autonomist and anarchist tendencies at war with techno-capitalist progress? Does this labeling preform some type of academic recuperation of political struggle, if so what are the consequences? Does environmental justice and degrowth support and/or profit from environmental conflicts where Indigenous, anarchists and autonomist tendencies are a driving force? These questions deserve further consideration and development within and outside the academy. The article below attempts to begin this conversation, offering feedback for the degrowth movement to support combative struggles with the space they have created. This short article offers feedback from over a decade of personal experience, but also more immediate observation by working with land defenders in France and Iberia fighting energy infrastructure and wind energy power plants. There is a strong affinity that exists between degrowth and land defenders, yet the academy has a way of excluding disruptive anarchistic and autonomist elements by employing self-referential theory from the narrow lens of the academy, mainstream (or popular) movements and nonprofits. It is my hope the degrowth intellectual and organizers will affirm and work to create greater affinity with anarchist and autonomist land defenders, which—to be clear—some are already doing. Yet the article below identifies some easy ways to further bridge this gap. References Akbulut B, Demaria F, Gerber J-F, et al. (2019) Who promotes sustainability? Five theses on the relationships between the degrowth and the environmental justice movements. Ecological Economics 165 (106418). Treu N, Schmelzer M and Burkhart C. (2020) Degrowth in movement(s): Exploring pathways for transformation. John Hunt Publishing. Why do degrowth intellectuals publicly neglect combative self-defense against “growth” projects? The connection between degrowth and anti-capitalist, autonomist and (ecological) anarchist movements exists, and it can be strengthened by acknowledging the legitimacy of a diversity of tactics as necessary pathways towards degrowing the techno-capitalist system and protecting habitats form infrastructural invasion. Degrowth is about reducing total material and energy throughput, which entails rejecting elite accumulation and the ideology of capitalism itself. For some—those acquiescing or clinging to the growth euphemism—degrowth is a provocative term. “Trying to avoid provocation, or trying to be agnostic about growth,” explains Jason Hickel referring to degrowth, “creates a milieu where problematic assumptions remain unidentified and unexamined in favour of polite conversation and agreement.” However, in matters of political struggle, it seems that the same applies to degrowth. Currently, influential degrowth approaches veer towards polite political conversation, mainstream movement politics and largely ignore the combative struggles putting degrowth into practice closest to home. While ambiguity can create space, we ought to acknowledge—and support to various degrees—the full range of degrowth action. Specifically, the land defenders fighting economic growth and its interconnected infrastructural schemes. ...

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— Alexander Dunlap, Mariel Aguilar-Støen - Wind Energy Development, Conflict & Resistance

 

at 4/13/24 6:25am

Author: Alexander Dunlap, Mariel Aguilar-StøenTitle: Wind Energy Development, Conflict & ResistanceDate: 20 Sep 2019Source: Retreived on 4 Jun 2020 from rowmaninternational.com/blog/wind-energy-development-conflict-resistance. Alexander Dunlap talks about his new book Renewing Destruction: Wind Energy Development, Conflict and Resistance with Professor Mariel Aguilar-Støen. MAS: I would like to start by asking if you can tell us a little bit about you? AD: Ouuuhhh... I am a dirty skateboarder turned academic who now has a post-doctoral position at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. Where I am proudly a part of the Rural Transformations group, which you lead. MAS: I found something you wrote in the book I would like you to explain. It is this adaptation of Michel Foucault, where you say: "How do you expect over a thousand wind turbines—operating, planned and placed in the lands of Mexico—to have survived, and to have established and actually maintained permanent power generation in the coastal Istmo? (p. 21)." How does this tie in to what the book’s about? AD: So, yes, this is a play on Foucault’s words when he was giving a lecture on colonial conquest, meanwhile really raising the question: How does a lesser number of people—a minority invader population—take over, settle and control another land and people? And this book really is asking the same question: How do a bunch of certain elite or business actors move into a territory, build this infrastructure and begin accumulating energy when there is a well-known and strong opposition towards these projects—at least near the Lagoon. This book really examines how the projects come to exist, how they continue to exist and generate power in a context where they are popularly opposed. It is really trying to look at the way how development projects—even if they are unpopular—can enter a region and begin to control the territory, make the population acquiesce to the project and start controlling land, but also harnessing the vitality of wind resources in that area. So, it is really looking at how megaprojects enter a region, but also the dynamics that begin to form. This includes the divisive tactics employed by companies that makes it more difficult for people to organize themselves to resist these projects adequately. MAS: It is also interesting that you start your book with a critique of anthropology and that you mention ethics in relationship to anthropological research. Can you explain what you mean by this? AD: Yeah... I guess the short answer is that in many ways I am embarrassed to be an anthropologist. The legacy and history of anthropological research is extremely negative by my account. Despite all the "nuance" and "reflexivity" in the discipline, structurally speaking I do not think much has changed in terms of the purposes of knowledge generation, the institutional control and privatization of that knowledge and the subjectivities—or the implicit socially accepted types of biases—that underline research design. Of course, there are exceptions, but radical critique regarding the statist forms of organization and the development of industrial infrastructures are not questioned to the degree that they should be. Modernist infrastructure and computational technologies still condition and dominate our academic lives, which is increasingly normalized and integrated into universities with little opposition. But also, a lot of the knowledge being generated—while there might be liberatory intentions for a lot of the researchers—I think a lot of the banal knowledge being collected and organized can benefit many different extractive companies, marketing agencies and repressive forces. Not to forget turning villagers into poster children in power point presentations. In the book, there is a subsection, responding to discussions in anthropological ethics, called "For Anthropologists Against Anthropology." The purpose is to really stress that, as anthropologists, we should be extremely critical of our discipline, but also ask ourselves why we are even researchers in the first place and what type of knowledge we want to generate. Because, as it says in the book, knowledge is a double-edged sword and it will often cut both ways. It is important to think critically in how one organizes their research. A lot of this is a response to the norms in anthropology, because I ended up embedding in a policia comunitaria (Communitarian Police) who were more-or-less a lightly armed group of fishermen and farmers with slingshots, machetes and their hunting rifles. They organized themselves to keep out the wind companies and the politicians that they saw as grabbing their land and destroying their livelihoods and culture. My fieldwork would have been considered risky if I proposed what happened with an ethical review committee at most institutions, but I did not know I was going to fall into the situation this way, even if it makes sense given how the research started, which is narrated in the beginning of the book. At the end of the day, it is all fun and games for anthropologists to go work for the military and police; it’s okay for anthropologists to go work for marketing agencies; it’s okay for anthropologists to go work for resource extraction companies, which is surprisingly more common than I expected as the research presented in the book and elsewhere[1] demonstrates. But when it comes to anthropologists actually embedding and conducting observant participation in environmental struggles to try and get a better idea of what is going on at the frontiers of the green economy, where people are trying to protect their land and sea, then these things are often frowned upon. ...

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— Alexander Dunlap - Ecological Authoritarian Maneuvers

 

at 4/13/24 6:14am

Author: Alexander DunlapTitle: Ecological Authoritarian ManeuversSubtitle: Leninist Delusions, Co-optation & Anarchist LoveDate: October 2022Source: <https://forged.noblogs.org/files/2022/10/dunlap-ecological-authoritarian-maneuvers.pdf> Forward This text emerges because of the lack of critical appraisal, if not deserved hostility, towards eco-Leninism. This excepts highlights the bad faith, academic dishonesty and shameless Leninist manipulations employed by Andreas Malm, which—in Leninist fashion—seeks to disarm and discredit anarchists and, to a lesser degree, (anti-state) Indigenous land defenders. Anarchists and Indigenous peoples are two broad signifiers—containing a great diversity—who are still alive, as well as they can be, and who obstruct the Leninist project in the past and present. Obstructing state capitalism, modernism and Marxian teleology (e.g. faith in historical materialism), earned rural and self-organized people Lenin’s scorn and hatred. Autonomy, spontaneity and direct action will always threaten high-modernist ideologies and resist the social engineering demanded by ‘socialist modernism’. The excerpt below, again, emerges from the general shock that academics and climate activists have largely failed to confront and discredit ecological authoritarianism, and have watched comfortably as Malm slanders people on the frontlines of social war, fighting in defense of land, sea, and dignity. There have been a handful of articles, notably Bue Rübner Hansen’s,{1} which challenges Malm’s entire body of work. Despite their forthright critique, Hansen also demonstrates confusion regarding the politics of attack, or decentralized direct action, when they refer to both the actions of “Earth First! or Earth Liberation Front (ELF)” as “vanguardist ecotage.” The academic ‘Left’ demonstrates a poverty both in terms of understanding, but also in taking the time to read and study—let alone experiencing the dilemmas of direct action and political struggle. This excerpt remains a contribution to this gap, as there appears to be a political, but also an academic incompetence that will have a generational impact. This excerpt, again, is a reaction to academics, not just Malm, who in their accidental or intentional totalitarian or liberal ignorance or lack of fighting spirit haphazardly erase or mischaracterize the histories as well as the existing struggles undertaken by anarchists. This mischaracterization and omission naturally stultifies movements, performs a subtle pacification and, in the Leninist case, a demagogic function to wrangle younger rebels becoming or without a cause. Malm, by all means, is just an archetype and point of focus due to their current platform offered to them by Verso books, academia and the media. Yet, we should expect many more ‘Malm types’ to come as socio-ecological conditions worsen. As we will see below, the future green authoritarians are likely to become more intelligent and cunning than Malm. The saddest thing about all of this—even more than having to write or give attention to these characters or topics—is that Malm represents a qualitative decline in the popular conversations concerning direct action, sabotage and a diversity of tactics. These conversations are not new, even if largely hosted outside academia by anarchist publishers and magazines, and for the obvious reasons. This writing serves as a reminder of what has happened, what continues to be and the manipulations published with little hesitation from reparable “radical” and “independent” publishers. This excerpt is for the new generations of rebels, and the ones that follow, looking to take an active part in resistance—but remain lost or paralyzed. It is worth studying those who have tried to save rivers and forests, risking life, limb and imprisonment. The secret is to really begin, but also to listen to yourself, the terrain where you play and those committed to creating liberated ecologies. Not talking heads from within knowledge factories—like myself. Towards happy cats, healthy rivers and vibrant soils. Alexander Dunlap, Portugal, October 2022. Meet Degrowth, the Green New Deal & Green Authoritarians When it comes to conversations on socio-ecological solutions, the Green New Deal, degrowth and authoritarian leftism are some of the alternative solutions debated right now. The Degrowth school, while containing multiple and differing voices, can all agree that in order to avert socio-ecological catastrophe, a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput must be organized until the economy is back in “balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.”[1] The expansive tendencies of capitalism – transforming the planet into urbanized environments that produce toxic and nuclear wastes – consumes labor, hydrocarbon, mineral, timber, and kinetic energy resources, which is placed front and center in the degrowth analysis. A key strength of degrowth is that its focus on reducing material throughput – the “taking” and “grabbing” – which positions it, in the word of Corinna Burkhart and colleagues, as “the most radical rejection of the eco-modernist mainstream of growth-centredness, extractivism and industrialism.”[2] Degrowth confronts the dominant myths of ecological modernism and “green growth,” which believe that technological solutions (e.g. low-carbon infrastructures, carbon capture storage, nuclear power, geoengineering) can remediate climate change and socio-ecological degradation while maintaining economic growth as we know it.[3] While there are various eco-modernist positions, which believe in state administration of large-scale technological projects and a command economy, others believe that capitalism and market mechanisms can correct ecological degradation through market-mechanisms and by decoupling economic growth from ecological degradation. The economy can grow, while ecological degradation can decrease. Eco-modernism, importantly, is an expression and continuation of the existing modernist, capitalist or state capitalist trajectories, even if many eco-modernists might argue the state is not doing enough with geoengineering, nuclear development, increasing urban densities and investing in technological innovation.[4] This position, however, has been thoroughly discredited at length by ecological economists and degrowthers.[5] Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, for example, conclude: ...

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— Colin Ward - Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility

 

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Author: Colin WardTitle: Autonomy, Solidarity, PossibilitySubtitle: The Colin Ward ReaderDate: September 30, 2011Source: <files.libcom.org/files/Colin-Ward-reader.pdf> Preface and Acknowledgements Colin Ward, who died in February 2010 at the age of eighty-five, was Britain’s most persistent and articulate defender of the libertarian Left in the second half of the twentieth century. For over six decades, this gentle anarchist bucked conventional wisdom by arguing that those who wish to see the emergence of a more compassionate, humane society need to think beyond the dogma of centralised state planning and the ‘free’ market. As a man of the Left, Ward insisted progressives and radicals should not cede to conservatism the ideas of‘self reliance’ and ‘autonomy’, ‘mutual aid’ or ‘enterprise’. As an environmentalist, Ward recommended that we should put aside the ‘cult of wild nature’ to develop an environmentalism that values working landscapes and the built environment. As a writer, journalist and social critic he counselled against being enthralled to experts and maintained that we can learn much from the day-to-day creativity of ordinary people. Drawing inspiration from a neglected tradition of libertarian, decentralist, regionalist and anarchist thinkers (from Peter Kropotkin and Lewis Mumford, to Ebenezer Howard and Martin Buber, Patrick Geddes and Paul Goodman), the starting premise of Ward’s writings is that we are first and foremost creative and resourceful beings and that given the right circumstances we are fully capable of organizing our own affairs in humane, co-operative ways. Such a bold position might strike some as startling, perhaps curious, romantic or simply naive. Yet Ward responds to such critics by suggesting that the curious mixture of cynicism, hopelessness and misanthropy that passes for a refined intelligence has itself long been a poor guide to organizing human affairs. Across some thirty books and hundreds of articles Ward counters cynicism about the possibility of developing social institutions that maximise solidarity and autonomy by bringing to light a range of self-organized and self-managed social practices—in housing, work and leisure, urban policy, architecture and design. His work explores community gardens, allotments and credit unions, housing co-operatives and participatory design, self-build dwellings and multiple other grassroots ventures organised around mutual aid and communal support. Such writings argue that we should attend seriously to the history and politics of such activities because they can facilitate autonomy, build new solidarities and like ‘seeds beneath the snow’[1], open new possibilities for living differently. Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility provides a wide ranging overview of Colin Ward’s six decades of writings. For the first time in one volume, it brings together a selection of Ward’s journalism, seminal essays, extracts from his most important books (and some more obscure ones), as well as examples of his final writings. The hope is that this collection will trigger interest amongst the uninitiated and remind older readers of the richness of his practical thoughts and writings. Minimally from this, some will be left suitably provoked and annoyed. Others though may well head off on their own, and more hopefully with others, to plot their own engagements with his work, and perhaps explore further the traditions and practice of self-organization he describes and defends. This anthology is the product of many years of work and it has concurrently incurred many debts along the way. The editors would firstly like to thank the late Colin Ward and his wife Harriet Ward, Charles Weiss and David Goodway for all their help in envisaging this project. Colin and Harriet Ward helped to develop this project in its early stages. They gave their time on numerous occasions to answer requests for interviews and they helped trace difficult to find articles. It was a pleasure to engage with Colin, and as Harriet has let us know, Colin’s checking of the introduction to this anthology for accuracy (with her aid) was his last engagement with writing. David Goodway’s help in developing this project from start to finish was invaluable. Ken Worpole, Peter Hall and David Crouch also swiftly responded to queries. Virtually all of Colin’s original writings were produced on a typewriter and most pre-date the rise of word processing (and in any case, he had no truck with computers). As such, assembling this anthology took many hours of transcribing and typing Colin’s prose into word processing formats. The British Library Reading Rooms, the library staff at James Madison University, Anglia Ruskin University, and the Rhode Island School of Design proved invaluable in locating materials and in copying and scanning of texts and microfiche. At a more general level, the writing and editing of books invariably draws support from a much broader circle of intellectual, academic and personal support systems. As such Chris would like to thank all those who had to put up with him when holidays beckoned and libraries took over. It seems to go with the terrain that this was work, but a lot was learned from Dennis Hardy and David Crouch at various times. We might not have always agreed, but then that is the way of conversations, and respect is due. Thanks also to Martin Spaul and Rikke Hansen for diffuse conversations on and around this work. ...

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