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Review: The British Communist Left, 1914-1945

A review of a “communist-left” (Bordigist) book on the British anti-parliamentarian communist movement which developed during and after the First World War. Suffice to say, it is not very good, as befitting Bordigist ideology.

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Praxis, lacking: On The Communist Manifesto and its historical context

This review of China Miéville’s book on the Communist Manifesto was written for the Marxist group Platypus. I was asked due to my speech The 1848 Revolutions: An Anarchist Perspective. Suffice to say, more could have been written but that speech plus the few links I’ve added to the text should help flesh out the arguments made.

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“Anti-government ideologues” and Coronavirus

For an anarchist, it is annoying to see the right – whether Trump or Johnson, the Tories or the Republicans – proclaimed “libertarians” or “anti-government”. They are neither, not least because they are members of governments and so repeatedly and regularly use State power to further their own and their backers’ interests.

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The Trotskyist School of Falsification

Most anarchists come across Victor Serge (1889-1947) at some stage, the elitist-individualist anarchist turned elitist-Bolshevik whom Leninists to this day like to invoke as “the best of the anarchists” to get libertarians to join their party (“Victor Serge: The Worst of the Anarchists,” ASR no. 61). This work by him and Natalia Sedova Trotsky, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), is a biography of Leon Trotsky and is of note as a good example of what could be termed The Trotskyist School of Falsification, to invoke the title of Trotsky’s 1937 work The Stalin School of Falsification. (171)

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Pushing back fascism and building the left – where KaN got it woefully wrong

The US fascist movement, like most fascist movements, is subject to vicious infighting.  If you observe their chatter you will see the expression ‘don’t punch right’ used frequently. This means focus your attacks on the real enemy. For them this is the left. Kill All Normies while providing a somewhat useful introduction to the new internet driven fascism unfortunately punched left and down with far more intensity than it punched right. Its taxonomy of the alt-right was sabotaged by often mean spirited attacks on the author’s (Angela Nagle) left enemies. Throughout the book she attacks women game developers who dare to insert feminist themes, obnoxious tweeters, intersectional feminists, gender rebellious Tumblrs and even anti-fascists who recognise the need for physical confrontation. 

Kill all Normies is thus best understood not so much as a book about the alt-right but as a collection of polemical essays, mostly directed at the radical left, making use of the moment of crisis that was the Trump election.  This piece should not be seen as a simple ‘is it worth reading’ review.  Instead I use KaN as a starting point for a number of important discussions for the left and to explore modern fascism as well as looking at some of the events involving the US far right that occurred after it was published and what they have to tell us about the real weaknesses of that movement.

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Revew: Rupturing the Dialectic by Harry Cleaver

There is nothing worse than seeing a film labelled “inspired by true events” (or a TV series “inspired” by the stories of Philip K. Dick) for you know that any relation to actual events is purely accidental. This does not mean the film will be bad – indeed, it may be excellent (Blade Runner springs to mind as regards Dick adaptations). It just means that when you discover the source of the “inspiration” you realise the film does not reflect it very much, if at all.

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Identity Politics is a Four way Conflict

Discussions about Identity Politics (IdPol) absorbs a huge amount of energy across the political spectrum.  Discussion on the left however is often complicated and made overly hostile because they take place along the single axis of oppression which means proponents of IdPol get lumped in with Hilary Clinton while opponents get lumped in with Donald Trump.  This understandably encourages bad faith discussions that throw a lot of heat and very little light. Here we are going to argue that a much more useful exchange can happen when we instead create a plot where one axis is oppression and the second is exploitation as that puts both Trump & Clinton a good distance away from socialists. [Audio of this article]

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Review: The Next Revolution by Murray Bookchin

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was for four decades a leading anarchist thinker and writer. His many articles and books – Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Toward an Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom and a host of others – are libertarian classics and influential in the wider green movement.

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Repeal and the online battle – when become a billionaire isn’t an option

Over the last few days the mainstream media in Ireland has finally woken up to the way money from far right US evangelicals is being used to buy the No vote in the referendum campaign. Here we show you how to see how you are being targeted and discuss what this means for the referendum and any conception of democracy not based on the ‘one dollar, one vote’ favoured by the elite.

 

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Review: Anarchists Never Surrender by Victor Serge

This book is a collection of new translations of articles by Victor Serge (1890-1947). Born of Russian anti-Tsarist exiles in Belgium, Serge is of note for his odyssey from anarchism to Bolshevism, then from Trotskyism to some kind of libertarian Marxism.