A <em>blog entry</em> is a single post to an online journal, or <em>blog</em>.
I send letters reasonably often. I’ve just sent one to the UK based Weekly Worker on the Russian revolution. They edited it down, and cut out a couple of key points. Their version can be found here. They removed a key quote from Engels and the awkward fact that the Bolsheviks onslaught against the soviets started before the civil war, amongst others…
Is there much point in doing this? Does it have in impact? Or is it water off a duck’s back?
Anyway, here is the letter in its original form.
Well, I could have a blog. Would this be of interest to anyone bar me?
I’m currently revising section H of An Anarchist FAQ and I’ve confirmed my opinion that Lenin not only distorted the anarchist theory in “State and Revolution”, but also Marxist theory as well. The social democratic vision of revolution was, in fact, the orthodox Marxist one — so the SPGB are right!
When I arrived in Florida and started working out how I was going to get around I realised the trip from Lake Worth to Sarasota which had looked like it should be simple was going to prove difficult. There was no Greyhound stop in Lake Worth so to get to the ‘All Power to the Imagination’ conference in Sarasota it looked like I’d have to catch a very early morning Tri-Rail to Fort Lauerdale and walk a couple of km there to the Greyhound station to catch what would be a day long bus sequence to Sarasota. So in both Miami and Lake Worth I’d been trying to find anyone else heading for the conference.
Lake Worth in Florida was one of the very few places on the US tour I could reasonably get to by train. It’s a smallish sea side town a couple of hours up the coast from Miami and just south of Palm beach. The population is around 35,000 and the town is split from the ocean by the Lagoon which gives it its name. It’s actually named after an American general who led one of the campaigns against the Seminole, a comple nationa comprised on a number of native america groups, escaped (black) slaves and (white) indentured servants. I’m going to mention them in more details in my Gainesville blog update.
On the last day of March 2008 I crossed the border from Canada to the US on a freezing early spring day and boarded a plane at Buffalo. A few hours late I emerged into the +30c temperatures of Miami. This was the start of the final and longest phase of my speaking tour which was to take my through Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon and California. Two years and one day have passed since the Miami meeting and its time to update that blog with what I can recall. I’m leaving the original blog untouched at the end of this update as it was one of the few written at the time with any substance.
I’m now in Miami, Florida where the speaking tour resumes for the final 6 weeks, 22 cities on Wednesday, details are at http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=8456
On my travels around the north east I used the opportunity to record interviews with many of the local anarchists who were organizing the meetings. I wished I could have done more, in particular its a pity I missed a New York City interview but often things didn’t come together. Anyway I did get six done and I provide links to them below.
These were done using a five year old laptop and a 20 dollar USB mic I got in Best Buy – when I have a bit of time I’ll probably post a detailed how to record interviews to the Information Booth forum on http://www.anarchistblackcat.org
St Patricks day 2008 saw me head to the Greyhound station in Syracuse for the relatively short trip to Buffalo where I was to speak at around 5 o’clock. It was still late winter, there was plenty of ice and snow in piles along the highway and here on the edge of Lake Ontario the Homeland security border control were active. They checked everyone on the bus before it left Syracuse and then boarded it again at the Rochester stop. This was the 14th and final stop on the second leg of my tour.
It was spring in Virginia but as I got into upstate New York it was still winter with ice covered lakes, piles of filthy snow and light flurrys falling along the highway. Snow is normal in Syracuse, it gets just under 3m of the stuff in the average year holding the record over any other large US city.
The most southerly stop of the second leg of my speaking tour was Richmond, Virginia. As we drove there from Baltimore I spotted a cherry tree in blosson at the side of the road, a few days before I’d been Greyhounding through snow and indeed a few days later when I returned to upstate New York I’d get back into ice and snow but those few days of spring were a welcome break from what had been a very long and hard winter. I drove down with Alex in a little red two seater with a brief lunchtime stop at Fredericksburg.