Archives: Blog entry

This will be a short blog on my A Libertarian Reader collection. A few people have indicated that they are looking forward to this appearing so they may be wondering what has befallen it. Suffice to say, there has been a few unexpected delays. Here I will indicate where it is in terms of expected publication dates and the changes which have been made to it.

Well, we are now a few months into the “new” Tory government and it is as bad as was expected. Brexit is not done and it would appear that rather than send £350 million a week to Brussels (a lie) we will instead be spending it on bureaucracy. While the Coronavirus is the major crisis going on currently, we should not forget that the Labour Party has just went through a leadership contest – produced by an election result widely portrayed as a disaster and so a crisis for Labour. This will be discussed anon, followed by a rare but old translation of a Peter Kropotkin article entitled “The Crisis of Socialism.” I hope this will help pass some time will self-isolating.

I have just posted the introduction to my Kropotkin anthology Direct Struggle Against Capital. Hopefully, something interesting to read if you are self-isolating – although I would recommend you buy the book from AK Press as it has a lot of interesting and often rare works by Kropotkin in it. Here I plan to make a few comments about the coronavirus crisis and Brexit.

I thought I would discuss the current coronavirus crisis and how an anarchist society would deal with it. This will be speculative but hopefully convincing as far as any discussion of a future society can be – although I do end with a few demands that should be raised now. I should note that, for those looking for something to read when self-isolating, the An Anarchist FAQ (AFAQ) appendix on the Kronstadt revolt of 1921 has just been revised – lots to read there! I should note that I’ve not proof-read this as much as I tend to do so be prepared for more typos that usual.

While writing my last blog on the Makhnovists, I recalled that I wrote a letter to the ISR on both Makhno and James Green on the Chicago Anarchists. So I wondered if they had printed it and what they said. They did and so, somewhat belatedly, I will make a few comments. As such, I will be covering ground I have covered before – but I do find this attempt to turn the Chicago Anarchists into Marxists annoying and a symbol of a deeper problem with Leninism, namely its historical revisionism.

Last year was a bit busy, not least because I was working through two big projects – A Libertarian Reader and a new translation of Kropotkin’s Words of a Rebel. Both involved translation, which is time consuming – not least trying to track down the context which the writer takes for granted.

I have posted a new review of a biography – hagiography? – by Victor Serge of Leon Trotsky which I have entitled The Trotskyist School of Falsification. Also at the end of this blog is a lengthy article by Ante Ciliga entitled “A Talk with Lenin in Stalin’s Prison” which is on the various oppositional Bolshevik groups he came across in Russian prison in the early 1930s.

Here, I plan to discuss Brexit and the recent election but, first, a few words on recent articles.