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Review : Terrorizing the Neighbourhood

Terrorizing the Neighbourhood seeks to map out what US foreign policy meant in the Cold War and what its probable direction will be in future. It also challenges some of the established conceptions of what the Cold War meant and as such should be read not just as an introduction to US foreign policy but also by those on the left who find now that their world view collapsed with the collapse of the USSR.

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Mutual Aid: Kropotkin versus Jones

I’m not sure why, but there seems to be a tendency by academics to discuss anarchism without actually bothering to find out much, if anything, about. George Monbiot does this quite regularly, with equally regular amusement for those who have even a basic understanding of libertarian theory. The latest is Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at UCL, in his new book “Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise”.

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Would cutting wages reduce unemployment?

The "free market" capitalist argument is that unemployment is caused by the real wage of labour being higher than the market clearing level.

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The Paris Commune, Marxism and Anarchism

An anarchist analysis of the Paris Commune of 1871, showing how it was influenced by anarchism and what lessons anarchists drew from it. It also discusses the Marxist and Leninist analyses of the Commune, showing how alien Leninism is to the spirit of the Commune and to the genuine Marxist theory of the state.

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Credit Crunch: The return of depression?

Brown is now discovering that proclaiming the end of “Boom and Bust” does not, in fact, mean much. The amazing thing about the current economic panicking is not that it is happening but that some people seem surprised by it. While on the way up many “experts” seem to forget it, capitalism has always been marked by a business cycle.

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A review of Negri and Hardt’s Empire from an anarchist perspective

ImageThe publication of Empire in 2000 created an intense level of discussion in left academic circles that even spilled over at times into the liberal press. This should please the authors, Antonio Negri, one of the main theoreticians of Italian ‘autonomous Marxism’ and a previously obscure literature professor Michael Hardt. It is clear that they see Empire as the start of a project comparable to Karl’s Marx’s Das Kapital. The Marxist Slavoj Zizek has called Empire "The Communist Manifesto for our time".

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Review of Social Ecology and Communalism

Social ecolgy

This collection of four essays contains the last works of Murray Bookchin. As such, it is of interest to all greens and radicals. Eirik Eiglad, the editor of the journal “Communalism”, provides an introduction and end piece to the book. Of the four essays, the first three were written when Bookchin was still considered himself an anarchist.

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Speaking tour – more information on the topics covered

This thread was created for my North American speaking tour to make it easier for people who attended meetings to find more information about the struggles and organizations I covered. It consists of links to the various struggles and organizations I talked about during the tour. The tour covered 44 North American cities in 2007 and early 2008.

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The Other America – MP3 Tales from the NE Anarchist Movement

New Jersey I spent the last month Greyhounding around the USA speaking about anarchism in Ireland. Fourteen cities, 20+ meetings in thirty days in cities with populations from thirty thousand to over eight million. On my travels I used the opportunity to record interviews with many of the local anarchists who were organizing the meetings which I edited on the bus and posted to indymedia.ie once I hit my next wi-fi signal. I’ve collated these interviews below, over two hours of audio in all.

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The service charge con

Cover story for WSM paper. The service charges that are being brought in north and south of the border are part of a process of further increasing the proportion of tax paid by workers. The trend in global capitalism is to replace ‘progressive’ taxes (like income tax) with flat-rate taxes (like VAT, service charges, etc) to further shift the taxation burden from rich to poor.