Well, it is that time of the year again – the London Anarchist bookfair is just a month or so away! I am going through the proof-edited version of my Kropotkin Anthology Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology (AK Press America have it on their webpage, with cover). The aim is for publication in the spring of 2014 and that is still on course, glad to say. I’m excited about it – it should be the definitive anthology of Kropotkin and show him for what has was, a practical revolutionary and class warrior, rather than the “gentle prince of co-operation” nonsense. Whether I succeed will depend on the reader!
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“The collection offers rare and often difficult to obtain excerpts from the voluminous works of Proudhon… in a single (if hefty) volume. These sources are essential in the study the intellectual history of the revolutions in France between 1830 and 1871… Both the casual reader, as well as the scholar, should find Property is Theft! a comprehensive and invaluable source” (Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, no. 57)
As some of you will know I’ve been working the last while on bringing an organiser of the 2012 mass student strike to Ireland for a speaking tour. Vanessa, our speaker arrived Saturday morning and after got to the AFA Ireland solidarity with Greek anti-fascists demonstration and the Shell to Sea fundraiser in Seomra Spraoi is speaking in Cork today. She spoke after a welcome meal we had for her in Seomra last night and (although I’m biased) I really think any radical will find what she has to say about the experiences of the strike really useful. The talk was very focused on the concrete organisational challenges of co-ordinating a 6 month long strike that had 400,000 students staying out of college for up to 6 months – some of the challenges will be familiar to you, but not at that scale.
Back from holiday and back into work – both work-work and union-work. Not much fun, time consuming and energy draining – but needed. Currently fighting an brazen attempt by management to make a few people redundant on particularly spurious grounds but luckily we have less hoops to jump through in terms of strike action this time. Things like this just drive home how inefficient and wasteful hierarchical workplaces (wage-labour!) are.
We turned on anonymous commenting on articles about a year back after we added Mollum to the site,a Drupal module that checks content to see if its Spam or genuine. For a good while the results were good but over the last few weeks Mollum has been losing the battle and the work of checking posts and deleting spam has become too much. So until the situation improves anonymous commenting is once more off and you need to register to post.
On my first night in Istanbul I got tear gassed and then had an encounter with a secret police man. Lacking time to write it up properly here instead is my side of Facebook chats with a couple of friends back in Ireland after I’d got back to my hotel that evening and was discussing what happened with them. I’ve got into the habit of writing up encounters with the secret police – see for instance ‘I still remember the First Time‘ and ‘A Shell to Sea Jailing and a run in with the Secret Police‘.
I booked a short trip to Istanbul at the start of June because of a growing interest in the Ottoman Empire. Just after I booked the flight the cops launched the massive tear gas attack on Gezi park and so my holiday became a lot more activist than I intended including getting gassed on the first night and having an encounter with a secret policeman.
Day 3 (Monday 24 June) of the week of action against Shell in Erris saw more spy cameras on the perimeter of the Shell compound at Aughoose destroyed overnight & anti-Shell slogans was painted on the walls and gates. During the day itself a Shell survery boat was successfully blockaded by Shell to Sea Kayaks although a couple of Kayaks were dragged along by the boat and capsized.
It is with a sad heart that I do this blog – Iain Banks, the Scottish writer, has died at a far too early age. Reading the interview published in last Saturday’s Guardian, it is obvious that one of the good guys has shuffled off this moral coil. In terms of his writings, I’ve only read his Science Fiction works and I would recommend them to all anarchist SF fans – particularly the Culture series.