Happy July 14th! All together now, "La Marseillaise":
Come, children of the Fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us tyranny’s
bloodied banner is raised…
Archives: Blog entry
A <em>blog entry</em> is a single post to an online journal, or <em>blog</em>.
It often seems that libertarian influenced events and organisations have become irreversibly linked with Marxism. Thus the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA, or the First International) and the Paris Commune are associated these days more with Marx than Proudhon (or anarchism) even though it was the followers of the French anarchist who helped create the former and gave the latter its distinctive characteristics.
As we wind down after the struggle against Shell’s pipeline ship the Solitaire I’m using this blog post to bring together the bits of audio and video I recorded during that struggle and which have already been published as comments to articles on indymedia.ie. In the next days I’m also going to trawl through my old web site and transfer over reports I wrote on the Shell to Sea struggle from a couple of years back to this site which will give a pretty complete archive of what I’ve produced. Shell got the pipeline into the bay but the next cycle of struggle will be the toughest for them as they try and run it through Rossport itself to link up to the refinery.
The new series of Torchwood (the Doctor Who spin-off, and, yes, Torchwood is an anagram of Doctor Who) is pretty good. "Children of Earth" is well worth watching, and has played havoc with my editing down of System of Economical Contradictions (volume 1) for the Proudhon Reader!
As you may have noticed it has been a full month since I last blogged, the largest gap I think in some while. There are multiple reasons for this but chief amongst them has been the enormous amount of energy that I have put into writing about the struggle against Shell in Erris, I’ll be reposting some of the material I have written and recorded to this archive over the next few days.
I was not sure I was going to blog this week, given that I’m busy and nothing had got me annoyed enough or seem interesting enough to comment on. However, that changed thanks to this article on the (excellent) new book Black Flame (which I’ve blogged on before) and the comment exchange I had with the author.
As discussed in An Anarchist FAQ‘s appendix on Symbols of Anarchy, anarchists at first used the Red Flag as their symbol of choice, with the Black Flag slowly replacing it over a period of many decades. Both flags, however, had their roots in working class struggle and protest, both were anti-capitalist symbols raised by working class people in revolt against exploitation and oppression.
Thanks to comrade at A Division by Zer0, AFAQ is now available for your e-reader (assuming you have one, of course). They have done to "in order to transform this excellent piece of work into a format that people can enjoy in portable devices as well as their monitor or as a book."
The e-reader version can be found here: An Anarchist FAQ on your e-reader
It is available in various versions:
One of the better things about Amazon is looking at the reviews and having a laugh at the nutters who "review" books on subjects or by people they dislike. They give them one star and include a little rant about the book, usually showing that they have not read the book in question. This can be seen from Chomsky’s books, "reviews" of Marx’s Capital and books by leading American liberals (such as Paul Krugman). They are almost always by right-wingers, needless to say.
It has been a while since I blogged… That is because I’ve been very busy. First, there was release 13.1 of AFAQ which, in itself, took longer to do than I hoped. And for those with a good memory, the release date (18th of June 2009) is ten years on from J18 (as marked by the Guardian, strangely enough). J18 was fun and the very next day I met the love of my life (so that anniversary is easy to remember…).