Anarchist Writers

The publication of Empire in 2000 created an intense level of discussion in left academic circles that even spilled over at times into the liberal press. This should please the authors, Antonio Negri, one of the main theoreticians of Italian 'autonomous Marxism' and a previously obscure literature professor Michael Hardt. It is clear that they see Empire as the start of a project comparable to Karl's Marx's Das Kapital. The Marxist Slavoj Zizek has called Empire "The Communist Manifesto for our time".

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater

This collection of four essays contains the last works of Murray Bookchin. As such, it is of interest to all greens and radicals. Eirik Eiglad, the editor of the journal "Communalism", provides an introduction and end piece to the book. Of the four essays, the first three were written when Bookchin was still considered himself an anarchist.

This article written in 1997 looked at the choices facing the left and the anarchist movement in terms of building a new anti-capitalist movement. Over ten years later the article remains much of its relevance, I wish it could be otherwise, both in terms of the argument it makes to the left in general and to anarchists in particular.

Network methods of organisation have proved to be very effective at organising one off summit protests. They have also played a vital role in building international solidarity, in particular with the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas in the mid-1990's. But the experience of those organising the summit protests suggests that in the aftermath the networks proved fragile and were unable to sustain a local impact.

It is an old cliché that anarchists are against organisation - the media loves to point out an imagined contradiction between anarchism and organisation. The reality is that (among other things) anarchism is a theory of organisation. The circled A often seen sprayed on walls represents the A of anarchism within the O of organisation.

Insurrections - the armed rising of the people - has always been close to the heart of anarchism. The first programmatic documents of the anarchist movement were created by Bakunin and a group of European left-republican insurrectionists as they made the transition to anarchism in Italy in the 1860's. This was not a break with insurrectionism but with left-republicanism, shortly afterwards Bakunin was to take part in an insurrection in Lyon in 1870.

Revolutionary martyrs, being unable to speak for themselves, are liable to be claimed by all sorts of organisations with whom in real life they would have had little in common. When they are of national or international importance, like the Irish syndicalist James Connolly, this also mean that biographies often tend to be very partisan affairs, aimed at recruiting the dead to one cause or another. The story of their life becomes reduced to a morality tale whose conclusion is whatever positions the author holds dear today.