Archives: Blog entry

A few new things, almost all reviews of books I consider important reading for anarchists. The one exception is a new review of Richard Dawkins Channel Four documentary on Darwin. Writing that introduction to Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid has come in really handy!

I’ve not uploaded old articles for a while, mostly because I’ve been busy researching labour strikes under Lenin (to refute the common Leninist assertion that the Bolsheviks had to impose party dictatorship because the working class was “atomised”). However, I thought I had better do so.

It’s a slow process – particularly as many of them were written as news articles for Freedom or as analysis of recent events for Black Flag. I’m not sure whether posting these is a good idea or not. Any comments on this?

I’ve just added a basic editor to the site which means when you publish an article you now have a set of buttons above the Body box that make it easy to add basic html formatting. For instance if you select some text and then click on the B then HTML strong tags will be inserted before and after the text which will put it in Bold when published.

Have I ever mentioned that I’m a but of a fan of Bakunin? He is not my favourite anarchist thinker (that would be Malatesta) but his ideas are basic revolutionary anarchism. His critique of Marx has been proven totally correct, which probably explains why Marxists tend to be so dismissive of him and his ideas.

I’ve a new article up if you can understand Spanish. It’s ‘Una introducción al anarquismo en los albores de la revolución china‘ which is an introduction I was asked to write to three articles of Ba Jin newly translated into Spanish. I’m not publishing the English original for now as it is in large part extracted from a much longer article I’ve submitted to the North Eastern Anarchist on The Chinese Revolution and Anarchism. That article should have appeared at the start of the year but fell through the cracks in the editorial process

I’ve decided to transfer a few articles and reviews about the Russian Revolution, as I’ve just finished a new review of an excellent book about the Bolshevik’s first year in power by Alexander Rabinowitch. My review summarises the key information in it — it is well worth reading. It covers the gerrymandering of the soviets to secure Bolshevik power — an awkward fact that at least two Trotskyist reviews did not bother to mention!

I’ve started the process of transferring files from my old webpage to this one. I’ve decided to put three review/reply essays about three very impressive anarchist thinkers and agitators: Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre and Louise Michel.

Well, yet another week and yet another letter to the CPGB! They have published my last one, plus a letter from the person who provoked my original letter. My reply is below.

I have to say that I am constantly impressed that the CPGB has such an open letters page and I applaud them for that. Unlike, say, the SWP, they do open their letters page to real discussions — which is pretty unique on the Leninist left.

Due to a mix up with typesetting, the official launch has been postponed by a month. So, last weekend in September should see the launch of volume 1 in Glasgow. Hopefully. Almost certainly, in fact.

I went along with a few friends last night to hear Giovanni Arrighi the author of The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing give at talk at the national gallery titled ‘Hegemony Unravelling: American Imperial Decline and the Ascent of China’. This was organised by something called Irish Seminars 2008 under the title ‘Republics and Empires’.