Cover story for WSM paper. Contracts the jailing of anti-war and bin tax protesters with what happened to tax evaders and corrupt politicans.
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On the bin tax jailings of 2003
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Xinhua has reported the death of the Chinese anarchist Ba Jin after a six year battle with cancer. Ba Jin was born Li Yaotang on 1904, in Chengdu, Sichuan Province but changed his name to taking Ba Jin which combines the names of two Russian anarchists. The first syllable in Chinese is that of the surname of Mikhail Bakunin and the last syllable that of Kropotkin. He translated Kropotkin’s work into Chinese.
Gale Ahrens has done the anarchist movement a real service in putting together this collection, which should rescue Lucy Parsons from the dark corner she has existed in. In it she emerges from the shadow of her martyred husband as a central if neglected figure in the development of anarchism in the USA.
The fundamental idea of anarchism is that as long as a minority make decisions on our behalf then we cannot be free. The decision making and enforcing apparatus this minority uses is the state; in Ireland it is the Dáil, local councils, the judiciary, the police force and a hundred other bodies, some visible, some invisible. While every other political current seeks to become part of the apparatus of decision making, the anarchists suggest something quite different. We want to smash the whole apparatus.
Over the weekend of March 31st an international libertarian/anarchist gathering was held in Madrid. It was hosted by the largest anarchist union in the world, the Spanish CGT, which has around 50,000 members. A number of other large libertarian unions attended including the SAC of Sweden and the Italian UNICOBAS.
Internationally there is a long and close historical relationship between anarchism and what in English is often referred to as syndicalism or revolutionary unionism. Such unions have no bureaucracy, all decisions being made by their membership and include among their aims the abolition of capitalism and its replacement with libertarian communism. Recently we received details of one of the newer syndicalist unions, the Siberian Confederation of Labour (SKT).
AS ANARCHISTS believe the bosses will resist a revolution, it follows that we accept the need for armed force to defend the revolution. But anarchists also oppose militarism, that includes standing armies controlled by the state with officers who have special privileges like extra rations, better quarters, saluting, etc. So what alternative do anarchists propose? [ Greek translation ]
Anarchism stands for ‘Socialism from below’. This means a future society where ordinary working men and women control all aspects of that society.
One measure of the success of the Class War Federation is that so many of the readers of this article will immediately recognise the name as belonging to a British revolutionary group. Well officially Class War is no more and what’s more they produced a final issue of there paper to prove it, No 73 headlined ‘Class War is Dead…long live the Class War’.
‘Unfinished Business’ is 186 pages of Class War explaining its political outlook. What’s more it does seem to represent a real if unacknowledged break with their past. The book is divided into sections which include capitalism, the state and revolutionary organisation. It provides a good, if sometimes flawed, introduction to the topics it covers