Kropotkin book event, Freedom Press, London, 21st June

As seems usual these days, I’ve been far too busy to blog. Been busy in writing a reply to an article on Proudhon in the current Anarchist Studies on social property.

As seems usual these days, I’ve been far too busy to blog. Been busy in writing a reply to an article on Proudhon in the current Anarchist Studies on social property. That issue also contains my article Sages and Movements: An Incomplete Peter Kropotkin Bibliography and talking of Kropotkin, I will be doing an event for Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology at Freedom Bookshop at 3pm on June 21st.

Kropotkin’s message for the 21st Century

3pm

Saturday, 21st of June, 2014

Freedom Bookshop (map)

Angel Alley

84b Whitechapel High Street

London

E1 7QX

So I’ll be busy making notes for my talk which will concentrate on Kropotkin as the practical revolutionary, the class struggle anarchist, and why reading the texts in Direct Struggle Against Capital will be benefical for today’s anarchists. As he put it in the early 1880s:

We have to organise the workers’ forces ? not to make them into a fourth party in Parliament, but in order to make them a formidable MACHINE OF STRUGGLE AGAINST CAPITAL. We have to group workers of all trades under this single purpose: “War on capitalist exploitation!” And we must prosecute that war relentlessly, day by day, by the strike, by agitation, by every revolutionary means. ("Enemies of the People")

Obviously I will be aiming to dispel the myths that Kropotkin was the gentle "Prince" of co-operation who wore rose-tinted glasses in favour of his actual ideas. Needless to say, given his role in helping create Freedom it is fitting that a meeting is being held there — although the irony that it is in 1914 (given his position in the First World War) as well as the sadness that Freedom is moving on-line is not lost on me.

Hopefully see you there! A hope to do meetings in Glasgow and Edinburgh sometime this year as well and, of course, I hope to have a talk at this October’s London Anarchist Bookfair in London.

In other news, the creation of a new Black Flag editorial group has started and I’m optimistic that a new issue will be available for the London Anarchist Bookfair. The movement really needs a decent publication which can be sold to non-anarchists!

My next blog will, I hope, be longer. I still aim to finish the Blackledge critique and write an article on the British economy. If I have the time, I may make a few comments on the response to Russell Brand. Sadly, that is a big "if"…

Until I blog again, be seeing you!