A review and evaluation of Voltairine De Cleyre’s politics, showing why modern radicals would gain from reading her. It uses three recently published books of her writings to discuss her ideas and their evolution from an individual to a communist anarchist and how it related to changes in North American anarchism. An important figure in Anarchist history whose ideas are of interest today, particularly as we still suffer from the patriarchy, capitalism and statism she opposed.
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A review of a book on that remarkable anarchist activist, Louise Michel. Sadly marred by an obvious, and utterly unnecessary, biasis for Marxism, it fails to do justice to her ideas and her life.
Categories
One law for the rich
At the end of October (2006), Denis Vranich, a millionaire night club owner and property speculator was convicted of a sexual assault on a 22 year old his employee working at his club. The Hamilton Spectator reported that "Vranich grabbed the woman, pulled down her bodice, groped her breasts and penetrated her with his finger", in her Victim Impact Statement the employee reported "The thought of him makes me absolutely nauseous and brings on panic attacks".
As anarchists we hope to help build communication between people engaged in struggle and inform a growing proportion of the real facts of such struggles. The other related aspect of an anarchist newspaper will be articles that sketch out what anarchism aims to achieve and what the history and current reality of that struggle
Normally the settlement of claims to property are something the court system takes very seriously. The very foundation of capitalism after all is that some person can claim ownership of a piece of land, and through that ownership charge others rent to use it.
Maurice Brinton was the pseudnum under which Christopher Pallis (1923-2005) wrote and translated for the British libertarian socialist group Solidarity from 1960 until the early 1990s. He was its leading and most influential member, unsurprisingly given the quality and insightfulness of his work, and his ideas still influence many today across the world.
This article looks at how direct action had forced one military airline out of Shannon in the context of how dependent modern wars are on long supply chains. This is used to argue that similar actions across Europe and the US could prevent the war from taking place. "In this war our rulers do not need us to fight as soldiers, they would like but do not require our support for the war. They do however need us to remain passive, for if we turn our disgust at this war into action against it then their war machine will grind to a halt."
A front cover story for Workers Solidarity in 2002 on the use of Shannon airport for refuleing US war planes
Report on the massive anti-war march in Dublin February 2003 and the plans for the March 1st direct action at Shannon airport that developed out of the meeting that morning.
Between February and May 2008 I interviewed 31 anarchists in the USA located in 17 different cities. The interviews are linked to below and provide a snapshot of the anarchist movement across the United States and anarchist attitudes towards local struggles and the US elections. The interviews were conducted during my ‘Building a Popular Anarchism in Ireland’ speaking tour during which I spoke at 45 locations across the USA and Canada.