A review of a “communist-left” (Bordigist) book on the British anti-parliamentarian communist movement which developed during and after the First World War. Suffice to say, it is not very good, as befitting Bordigist ideology.
Region: Europe
A review of Carolyn Ashbaugh’s Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary which debunks her claims that Lucy Parsons was not an anarchist. It also refutes her attempt to protray Emma Goldman as some sort of lifestyle anarchist, showing how she and Parsons shared a similar communist anarchist perspective. It appeared in Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 2 No. 1 (Spring 2022)
This is my introduction to the 2019 PM Press edition of The Unknown Revolution by Voline. It is a classic anarchist analysis of why the Russian Revolution failed by an active participant, seeking to ensure future revolutions do not make the same mistakes. The book is available, so please consider buying it from the publisher.
This is a write-up of a talk I gave in Nottingham in March 2019. It is an introduction to the 1936 Spanish Revolution as well as a general introduction to the anarchist theory which inspired it. After all, you cannot see how 1936 was anarchy in action if you do not know what anarchy is. The meeting was advertised as following:
“Iain McKay takes us back to Spain in the 1930s where anarchists occupied the factories and the land, to make a revolution at the same time as fighting Franco’s fascists. And within that revolution, the women of Mujeres Libres fought also for the liberation of women.”
This is what I would like to have said, rather than what was actually said at the meeting. Hopefully the difference is not too great. It is based on section I.8 of An Anarchist FAQ.
Most anarchists come across Victor Serge (1889-1947) at some stage, the elitist-individualist anarchist turned elitist-Bolshevik whom Leninists to this day like to invoke as “the best of the anarchists” to get libertarians to join their party (“Victor Serge: The Worst of the Anarchists,” ASR no. 61). This work by him and Natalia Sedova Trotsky, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), is a biography of Leon Trotsky and is of note as a good example of what could be termed The Trotskyist School of Falsification, to invoke the title of Trotsky’s 1937 work The Stalin School of Falsification. (171)
A discussion of the Paris Commune and its legacy from an anarchist perspective, indicating how it influenced both Anarchism and Marxism. It shows that anarchism alone has learnt its lessons and that Marxism, particularly in its Leninist form, paid lip-service to it while ignoring both its actual politics and its lessons.
Book length histories of the Repeal referendum have started to appear. That this second one is an autobiography is in itself a testament to how long the 8th Amendment ruled over us. The 8th amendment takes up about half the space of Peter Boylan’s ‘In the Shadow of the 8th’. Boylan was an obstetrician who retired from Holles St in 2016, he was a prominent spokesperson for Repeal in the referendum of 2018 and was then central to the implementation of abortion access in the aftermath of winning that referendum. In telling the story of his medical career he tells the story of how the 8th shaped it.
The publication of the co-directors history of the Together for Yes (T4Y) campaign is an important step in building an accessible collective history of the final stage of the long struggle to repeal the hated 8th amendment to the Irish constitution. It along with the forthcoming Together for Yes review of the referendum campaign should probably be read by everyone who worked for Repeal, if for no other reason than to get a better understanding of the ‘big picture’ of what we were involved in.
On 25th May 2018 Ireland voted by 2 to 1 to remove the ban on abortion from the Irish constitution. This massive victory came after years of grassroots campaigning demanding that the government call such a referendum and then a very intense 68 days of campaigning where 1000s of volunteers threw everything they had into winning. For 30 years before that I campaigned and wrote about that struggle and in the years since I’ve started to try to capture the learnings from that moment of change from a specifically anarchist perspective. This is an index of that material and an appeal to those anarchists who were involved to consider doing an audio interview with me that can further add to this story.
As part of the global climate strike about 25 thousand students marched through the center of Dublin city. This was one of many demonstrations that took place around Ireland, even the small dormitory towns around Dublin like Maynooth had their own demonstrations. So the actual numbers protesting in Ireland was probably in the region of 40,000. In this piece Andrew looks at how collective action can halt Climate Breakdown using the example of the need for transport to illustrate why individual consumer choices cannot fix things.