A short overview of the anarchist critique of the Leninist counter-revolution.
Topic: Anarchist movement
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.
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
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.
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.
An overview and analysis of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid showing how it has faired against developments in modern science as well as how it relates to anarchism.
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.