A short review of a book which discusses labour protest under Lenin. Essential reading.
Categories
A short overview of the anarchist critique of the Leninist counter-revolution.
An anarchist overview of the Kronstadt rebellion, written to mark its 85th anniversay. It exposes the various slanders by Leninists against it.
Categories
Review: Kronstadt 1917-1921
Review of Israel Getzler’s essential book about the Kronstadt soviet and rebellion.
This Open Letter was written for indymedia.ie in answer to an open letter from one of the main leninist parties in Ireland that had been published in their newspaper. I’d recently had some bad experiences of their methodology in other struggles which inspired me to write this reply to explain why such a letter was not going to get a positive response. Later in that year and across the following two we were going to have a lot of problems with this party in the anti-war movment and then the European Union summit protests of 2004.
In 1998 building workers struggled against the replacement of directly employed workers with contractors through ‘Building Workers against the Black Economy’ an extra union group that was in reality quite close to the unions and set up to avoid the Industrial Relations Act being used against the unions. In the course of the struggle David McMahon and William Rodgers were jailed, this text is an Anarchist News produced by WSM around the protests at this jailing.
The An Post (post office) dispute of June 1992 should be seen in the context of a fight against casualisation by a well organised workforce. The origins of the dispute go back to March 1990 when the Communication Workers Union (CWU) National Executive agreed with An Post’s plan to introduce to casual workers. An emergency motion at the CWU conference in May however instructed the Executive to oppose the introduction of casuals.
Categories
Red Emma and the Reds
A reply to a Leninist (ISO) article on Emma Goldman and her politics. It corrects the distortions and selective quoting, as well as showing her support for syndicalism. It shows that rather than being an elitist individualist, her politics were about collective class struggle while defending individuality. In other words, like all communist-anarchists, her ideas were rooted in both solidarity and freedom. It shows that it is the Leninist tradition which is elitist, before concluding that Goldman’s politics have important ideas for modern radicals.
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.
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.