IGNACIO DE LLORENS HAS JUST PUBLISHED THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF THE RUSSIAN ANARCHIST VOLIN, A KEY FIGURE IN THE CREATION OF THE FIRST SOVIET AND LATER PERSECUTED BY THE BOLSHEVIKS ~ David Sánchez Piñeiro, Nortes ~ Ignacio de Llorens is a historian and philosopher. We met with him to discuss his newly published book, a compilation of research conducted intermittently over several decades: Life Will Shine on the Cliff: Volin (V. M. Eichenbaum) published in Spanish by KRK editions. It is the first biography of this Russian anarchist, whose life is as fascinating as it is unknown. The biography is based in part on testimonies from people close to him, such as his son Leo, and on previously unpublished documents. Volin, a pseudonym derived from the Russian word volia, meaning “will,” was the driving force behind the first soviet in Saint Petersburg in 1905. He managed to escape from Siberia, where he had been condemned by the Tsarist regime. He was forced into exile in the United States due to his anti-militarist activism in France during World War I. He played a leading role in Nestor Makhno’s peasant and libertarian revolution in Ukraine. He suffered repression at the hands of the Bolsheviks, and Trotsky even ordered his execution. He was released from prison thanks to the intervention of a CNT delegate, but was expelled from Russia for life; he directed an anti-fascist newspaper in support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and wrote The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, his great work published posthumously, in which he developed an implacable critique of the Bolshevik Revolution from an anarchist perspective. As is always the case with the best books, this one by Ignacio de Llorens is also the fruit of a sustained obsession. Where can we begin to delve into the figure of Volin and his biography? Volin was what is usually called a privileged young man, from an educated family, with parents who were doctors and of Jewish origin. As a young man, he belonged to the last wave of the Narodniks [Russian populists], who went to the villages to educate people who had been serfs until recently. In his case, his educational work wasn’t directed at the peasants, but at the workers of Saint Petersburg, where he was studying law. He abandoned his studies to dedicate himself to educating these workers he was beginning to meet in the city. Following the 1905 revolution, his teaching group would eventually become the first soviet. Volin then joined a broad revolutionary political movement that sought to change society and address injustices, and this would become the main focus of his life. Volin began to have contact with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and later, in a legal process that remains unclear, a pistol was discovered in his possession, and the Tsarist authorities sentenced him to life imprisonment in Siberia. He escaped and went into exile in Paris, where he began to gravitate towards anarchist thought, heavily influenced by his reading of Kropotkin. He played a leading role in the creation of the first soviet in 1905. Yes, indeed. The soviets are an original creation of the Russian revolutionary process. We can say that Volin is the creator of the soviet, along with a group of workers who studied with him. They were adult working-class students who felt the need to take action. The Tsarist regime could be changed, and it was time to get involved. This was done by the people themselves; it didn’t happen through parties or “normal” political institutions, but directly through the actions of those involved, who in this case were the initiators, workers from Saint Petersburg. The soviet would remain a structure of self-participation for the people and would even spread, not only to urban working-class communities but also to rural areas and soldiers’ quarters. It was the logical way for social protest movements to organise themselves. The soviet is a council and has a minimal structure so that it maintains its original characteristic of being the people who resolve their own political concerns. It is the soviets that are truly carrying out the process of overthrowing Tsarism. Trotsky would say that the February Revolution of 1917 took everyone in exile by surprise, and that no one believed it would happen at the time. It was a spontaneous revolution, led and created by the people themselves. How is it that, in such a short time, a revolutionary from the very beginning ends up being persecuted and repressed by the Bolsheviks themselves? The February Revolution was a spontaneous revolution, a revolution of the soviets, which spread like wildfire following a series of strikes. At that point, the main political figures (Lenin, Trotsky, Volin, Kropotkin) began to return from exile to participate in a process that consisted not only of creating a democratic state, but also involved the utopian visions that each of them held for society. Revolutionary struggles began to emerge that went beyond the democratic state that had been born in February. The October Revolution of 1917 was, in fact, a coup d’état and established a power, called Soviet for added confusion, which would end up being the first form of a totalitarian state known in the 20th century. The Bolshevik party, which staged the coup in October, seized power by ignoring the other parties and without the support of the majority of the population, as was evident in the subsequent elections. It established itself guided by an ideology that dictated that liberation had to be imposed on the liberated, even if they didn’t want it, and they didn’t want it because the people, who did not overwhelmingly support them, had an alienated consciousness and were ignorant of the scientific basis of human development. With this ideological “justification,” groups opposed to the new Soviet state were repressed and imprisoned. In Volin’s case, his anarchist activism led to him being particularly persecuted. Volin then moved to Ukraine. How and why did he end up there? Volin became discouraged because the anarchist groups he was involved with were rife with infighting and arguments. He ultimately went to Ukraine. There, a revolutionary peasant movement was emerging, linked to the figure of Nestor Makhno, which would eventually form an insurrectionary army of over 30,000 soldiers. Ukraine had been ceded to the occupying powers of World War I by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed by Lenin and Trotsky against the wishes of most of the Bolsheviks’ own Central Committee. Ukrainian anarchist comrades went to Russia to find Volin and help him create an organisation that would become Nabat. He moved to Ukraine with them, and within this organisation, he tried to defend his conception of anarchism, which he termed the “anarchist synthesis”: avoiding internal disputes and seeking common ground to create a united front capable of driving a successful revolutionary process. In Ukraine, he soon met Makhno. Giuliai Pole, Makhno’s hometown, was the epicentre of a movement rejecting the Austro-Hungarian occupation troops. The peasants began to consolidate their lands, create communes, and a revolutionary process began. At the same time, they armed themselves as an insurrectionary army. Volin joined forces with Makhno, and they worked together. He spent six months within the Makhnovist structure in charge of cultural affairs: creating schools, magazines, books, lectures, and libraries, attempting to organise everything in a libertarian manner. He was only there for six months because he was arrested shortly afterwards. Although initially there was collaboration between the two armies to fight common enemies, the Bolsheviks ultimately decided they had to dismantle Makhno’s libertarian movement. The Makhnovist army fostered the creation of peasant communes that organised themselves. It was a libertarian, horizontal model, independent of any leadership. The Bolsheviks believed they had to destroy this model of anarchist peasants and subject them to the new power structures, hence their becoming enemies. Relations would always be highly conflictive, and the Red Army would never completely crush them, because the Makhnovist army served as their vanguard against the White Army troops, who, aided by international powers, sought the restoration of Tsarism. Makhno’s guerrilla tactics were perfectly suited to attacking these armies, and they proved very useful militarily to the Bolsheviks. At that point, they provided them with weapons. After a couple of years, when the danger subsided, the Bolsheviks were not going to respect the existence of a large area of anarchist communes that did not adhere to their model. They wanted to destroy them, and they did so in 1921. Makhno was almost always viewed very critically and negatively. He is portrayed as a degenerate. There were even Soviet films that depicted him as a kind of mad bandit who terrorised people. He has a great negative legend, which has begun to dismantle in recent times, with the fall of the USSR. Although his figure is always subject to debate due to the publication of the diary of [his former comrade] Gala Kuzmenko, where she recounts excesses committed by Makhno’s soldiers, driven by alcohol and brutality, who also abused the power they acquired, contrary to their own principles. You dedicate an entire chapter to the relationship between Volin and Trotsky, two figures who crossed paths over time in different countries. In April 1917, a premonitory conversation took place between them in a New York printing shop. This sort of intertwined life with Trotsky is one of the most interesting aspects of Volin’s biography. Both were Jewish, intellectually educated, and participated in the creation of the first soviet. Both were condemned to Siberia by the Tsarist regime in 1906 and both escaped, each on their own: Trotsky by sled and Volin on foot. Both went into exile and would meet again in a New York printing shop, each working on his own magazine. During a discussion, Volin told him: “When you come to power, the first people you’ll eliminate are us anarchists. We’ve outflanked you on the left, and you won’t accept that.” Trotsky complained and told him that the Bolsheviks weren’t devils. Later, when Volin was arrested in Ukraine, his captors didn’t know what to do and asked Trotsky for instructions. The telegram that arrived from Trotsky was scathing: “Shoot him immediately.” They didn’t, and he managed to escape, but Trotsky’s intention was indeed to eliminate him. Lenin even went so far as to say that he was too intelligent to be free. Volin was a serious opponent, from the left, and moreover, he had a platform in the social uprisings of Ukraine and Kronstadt, the third great revolution that was aborted by Trotsky and the Soviet army because it would have challenged the foundations of the state the Bolsheviks were creating. The situations were different, both for Lenin and a delegation from the Spanish CNT. Volin was repeatedly arrested and released, depending on the political situation, due to the agreements Makhno made with Lenin, as Lenin still needed Makhno to attack the White armies. On one occasion, Volin was released and immediately rearrested without trial and indefinitely. It was then that Lenin decided he was too dangerous to let go. The possibility of Volin and other comrades being released from prison was thanks to the Third International congresses held in Russia. Delegates from abroad, socialists and some more or less sympathetic to the anarchists, arrived and were aware of the problem: there were many anarchists imprisoned. The one who acted most brilliantly to secure the release of Volin and his comrades was one of the CNT delegates. Four delegates from the CNT had gone: Nin, Maurín, Arlandís, and Ibáñez, who was from Asturias. They were all Marxists and went with the intention of handing the CNT over to the Comintern. At that time, the CNT was underground, and its main members had been killed by employer-backed gunmen or were in prison. There was a kind of organisational vacuum. Andreu Nin was the Secretary and a CNT delegate; this group went to Russia and the CNT did indeed join the Third International. At the last minute, the anarchist groups in Barcelona managed to get a French comrade, Gastón Leval, into the delegation, paying for his trip. This was a stroke of luck for Volin, because Leval was the one who would get him out of prison. Leval visited Volin in prison and was the one who took his release most seriously. He met with Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky became very agitated, even grabbing Leval by the lapel and hurling insults at him, but ultimately, faced with the potential international scandal these delegations could cause, they decided to release them. Opponents were either eliminated or expelled, and this group was chosen for expulsion. Volin and other anarchists went into perpetual exile. The book includes a chapter dedicated to the Spanish Civil War, in which Volin was also deeply involved, albeit from afar. Exile was very hard for everyone, but especially for those who knew no languages other than Russian or Ukrainian. It’s a very sad subject to study. There are well-known cases like that of Yarchuk, the first historian of the Kronstadt rebellion. He couldn’t adapt to either Berlin or Paris, returned to Russia, and was eventually killed. Or the case of Arshinov, which is particularly painful because he was the leading historian of the Makhnovist movement. Arshinov had mentored Makhno and eventually evolved towards Bolshevism. This evolution is subject to debate because some historians believe it was a maneuver to infiltrate the Communist Party, but this is completely absurd. Arshinov has texts where he renounces anarchist thought, apologizes, and slanders or mistreats the Makhnovist movement that he himself had praised in his book. Volin resisted this malady of exile. One of the most curious and regrettable things that happened during that exile was the confrontation between Makhno and Volin. Volin was always critical of the Makhnovist movement itself. He considered it an excellent libertarian revolution, but it had a number of aspects that needed to be criticised, such as the excessive leadership surrounding Makhno and certain violent, aggressive, and authoritarian attitudes exhibited by members of the Makhnovist army. Makhno died young in 1934, and Volin remained one of the few remaining resistance fighters from those groups that had been expelled. He continued to participate in all the anarchist initiatives of the time. He became a Freemason to persuade other Freemasons, contributed to the Encyclopédie anarchiste (Anarchist Encyclopedia) edited by Sébastien Faure, and wrote for numerous magazines. In 1936, the CNT (National Confederation of Labour) appointed him editor of a newspaper, L’Espagne Antifasciste (Antifascist Spain), so that he could report from France on the events of the Spanish revolution. But the CNT soon cut off its support for the newspaper because Volin did not support the CNT’s policies of participation in the Republican government. Volin’s son fought in Spain with the Republican side and revealed important information about Durruti’s death. Leo Volin, with whom I had a long interview over three days in 1987, volunteered in the anarchist columns and was with Cipriano Mera during the capture of Teruel. Leo told me that when he returned to France after the war, he spent a few days in jail in Cerbère, just across the border, and there he met a friend of his, a certain André Paris, who was a communist. Paris was traumatised by Durruti’s death and told him, “Leo, I assure you I didn’t fire,” implying that the group he was with was the one that had killed Durruti. Perhaps one day a historian will be able to verify this. Volin’s criticisms of the Spanish anarchists, which led the CNT to stop funding his newspaper, are quite telling regarding the rigidity of his political positions. Volin was certain that the revolutionary process had to lead to the disappearance of the state, not the creation of a new one. In Russia, a new state structure had been created that had ultimately become totalitarian. He had written a pamphlet that became somewhat famous, titled “Red Fascism.” Fascism is two-headed, with the communist head having been created by Lenin and the Bolshevik party. The fascist head was already on the rise in those years with Mussolini and Hitler. According to his analysis, in the Spanish revolution, the strength of the CNT-FAI made it possible to dissolve the state structure and organise a new form of society. Do you see parallels between the Ukrainian libertarian movement led by Makhno and the anarchist movement during the Spanish Civil War? It’s a very interesting topic to study in detail. The fundamental difference is that the Makhnovist movement had to develop these collectivisation and cooperative projects in a tremendous war context. They barely had a few months of peace, because then an army would enter and destroy everything. The libertarian collectives in Spain were more stable, especially those in Aragon. The Aragon front didn’t move for more than two years, and they had enough time to draw some conclusions from their experience. This experiment was ultimately crushed, first and foremost, by the communist army of the Karl Marx Column, led by Enrique Líster of the Communist Party. They stormed the Aragon collectives to destroy them because they didn’t approve of a revolution not subject to communist dictates. In a way, what had happened with Makhno was also being repeated. The main enemies will be the communists, who cannot tolerate any type of social experimentation different from their own and that could surpass them from the left. Lister’s column abandoned the front to destroy the libertarian collectives of Aragon. In the collective imagination of some on the left, there is the idea that the Russian Revolution went more or less well in its first stage, but Stalin’s rise to power initiated a totalitarian drift. You propose, following Volin, an alternative interpretation that emphasises continuity: Stalin merely followed in the footsteps of Lenin and Trotsky. Stalinism is an ideological invention created by left-wing Marxist authors to save Lenin and Trotsky, because Stalin is beyond redemption. That is the thesis that Volin refutes. Lenin and Trotsky had created a brutal authoritarian state. The Gulag began with Lenin in 1918, and the Red Army and the tactics of mass annihilation of dissidents began with Lenin and Trotsky. From 1991 onward, when the archives were opened, terrible things were discovered. I’m reproducing one of those handwritten messages from Lenin recommending that peasants be executed and their corpses hung up, for everyone to see, and that it be a cruel act. The creation of extermination and internment camps for dissidents began in 1918, and Lenin and Trotsky supported it. Stalin simply continued, taking it to its extreme, the model of repression. When Trotsky complained that Stalin was persecuting him, Volin laughed and told him that they were doing to him what he had done to others. When Trotsky was being persecuted and expelled from every European country, and a campaign was launched to allow him to settle in France, Volin joined that campaign. He believed that Trotsky should be given the freedom he denied others. Throughout the book, you emphasise the importance of not losing sight of the moral principle that, in politics, not all means are justified to achieve a desirable end. I wanted to trace this issue back to its tactical and ethical origins, which would be the case of Nechaev. Nechaev was a scoundrel who created a group in Moscow to assassinate and carry out terrorist acts. One of the members wanted to leave the group, and Nechaev then had all the other members killed to make them complicit in the murder. It was a shocking story, which served as inspiration for Dostoevsky to begin writing the novel Demons. Nechaev left Russia and ensnared Bakunin to use him for his own revolutionary purposes. Bakunin allowed himself to be seduced by this young man who arrived from Russia with an aura of a revolutionary and even participated in an abject text called “Revolutionary Catechism,” which justified any action as long as it served the revolution. Finally, Bakunin saw the light. In the 1960s, a historian found a letter in the French National Library in which Bakunin rejects and criticizes Nechaev, calling him an arbek, a bandit. Bakunin redeemed himself from that model of revolution in which everything is subordinated to the end goal, and the end goal saves everything. The one Nechaev did seduce was Lenin. Lenin vindicates Nechaev, a fact that is often forgotten. Andrei Siniavsky, a Russian writer of the 1960s who is credited with coining the term “dissident,” recounts in his book how Nechaev was behind Lenin. If the libertarians were different from the others, they had to prove it. Prove it in victory, when they won. They needed to display their magnanimity, their great soul, by avoiding executions, atrocities, and everything they opposed. Volin himself recounts his disappointment that harsher measures weren’t taken to prevent the atrocities committed by the Makhnovist soldiers themselves. Ideology doesn’t justify morality. The old anarchists of the International in Spain used to say that before being an anarchist, you have to be just, only to find out that being just makes you an anarchist. It’s in each action itself that you have to demonstrate your principle. The difference isn’t in what you say, but in how you do it. This is what was rightly criticised about Luther: justification by works, not by faith. Morally speaking, Volin comes quite close to that ideal. I’ve tried not to write a hagiography of Volin in the book, because the character is very appealing. At most, you can say he’s an outdated, incorrigible idealist, but morally there’s little that can be said against him. He’s a very upright and hardly questionable man. To conclude: Volin had a relationship with two of the leading figures of international anarchism in the first half of the 20th century: Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. What can you tell us about that? Kropotkin’s writings were crucial in his drift toward anarchism. In his decision to abandon his law studies in his final year and dedicate himself to educating workers, the young Volin was fulfilling Kropotkin’s proposal in his text “To the Young.” Volin rigorously applied the renunciation of privilege to work for justice. During one of his periods of freedom during the revolutionary process, he visited Kropotkin; they talked, and he left feeling strengthened. Kropotkin was always a guiding light for him on his journey. Emma Goldman arrived in the Russian Revolution from the United States. She had less contact with Volin because there were many periods when Volin was imprisoned. But she always referred to him as one of her most valuable comrades and also did everything possible to secure his release. Emma Goldman tried to prevent the authoritarian drift of the Soviet regime. At first, she seems to justify the measures taken by the Bolshevik state, but little by little she realizes they are creating a Jacobin terror, opposes it, and leaves Russia with her partner Alexander Berkman. They can no longer prevent the authoritarian and repressive drift of the communist regime. They go to England and try to campaign against it, but she herself recounts in her book, My Disillusionment in Russia, the little resonance her opposition to the authoritarianism of the Soviet regime finds among intellectuals of the 1920s. The prestige of the Bolshevik regime will extend into the 1930s, when the Stalin trials begin and it becomes more difficult to defend it. Then begins the ideological maneuver of rescuing Lenin and Trotsky and not identifying them with Stalin. Solzhenitsyn said that Stalinism is an invention of communist intellectuals to unleash all sorts of filth against Stalin. Stalin does not betray Lenin; the revolution betrays the soviets themselves. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation. Photos: David Aguilar Sánchez The post “Stalinism is a Marxist invention to save Lenin and Trotsky” appeared first on Freedom News.

FIFTEEN YEARS ON, ONE OF THE WOMEN WHO BLEW THE LID OFF THE SPYCOPS SCANDAL TALKS TO FREEDOM ABOUT HER POLITICAL INSIGHTS — AND WHAT THE UNDERCOVER POLICING INQUIRY HAS REVEALED ABOUT THE WORKINGS OF THE BRITISH SECRET STATE ~ Interviewed by Uri Gordon ~ You’ve just launched your book Disclosure, how did it go? It’s been really great actually, I was kind of nervous because I didn’t really think about it for a long time and then suddenly it was like ‘Oh my God that’s happening next week’ but it was really good—we did the talk at Hay on Wye, Housmans bookshop which was really lovely, and Sumac centre in Nottingham—it was lovely to be back at the Sumac, it felt really vibrant when we were there, and people were saying that’s something that’s happened in the last year or so, like since COVID. After it was trashed by the spycops stuff and then COVID now it’s finally starting to get back to being an exciting community space so that was really lovely to see. It’s coming on to 15 years since Mark Kennedy was exposed and the huge snowball that followed, with the Undercover Policing Inquiry still moving on with lots of issues and delays. But looking back, what did you learn through the inquiry that you hadn’t already known about infiltration, entrapment… OK so this is quite complicated, because the political police that were spying on my groups were not trying to send people to gaol for the most part, and I think there’s quite a big difference between the political police who are reporting back on everything you do, every aspect of your social network, every conflict or embarrassing thing that’s ever happened in your life with a view to maybe being able to leverage it; this kind of weird shadowy ideological political policing is obviously very different from the undercover police officer who is there to gather evidence and get people sent to gaol. But there’s stuff that I learned right at the beginning when Mark was first uncovered, because it’s not like we didn’t think they might be spying on our meetings. But when it turned out to be Mark, and it turned out to be Jim Boyling, and Rod Richardson, and Lynn Watson, then I really learnt that, you know, the people who are socially awkward and make you feel uncomfortable and maybe come to one meeting and don’t get involved in very much and then leave—who were the people we always assumed were the spies—are just socially awkward people. And again, in my naiveté this surprised me at the time, but the spies have read How to Make Friends and Influence People cover to cover, and they’re charismatic, they’re trained in emotional manipulation, they’re right in there at the heart of stuff, and they’re living in your house and sleeping in your bed. So that was a learning curve. The Undercover Research Group put together a very good document with “15 questions to ask” if you suspect someone in your group is a cop, it’s also got a lot of disclaimers about how not to destroy your group with paranoia and rumours. Let’s zoom out to the bigger picture, what are we finding out through the UCPI? The insights that we’ve gained into the big picture are massive. Lots of people are quite rude about the Inquiry—and yes it’s a public inquiry run by the British state, and it’s mistreating the victims in horrible ways, but the information that is coming out of it is incredible. First of all, just in terms of insights into the workings of the secret state. One big story that didn’t get enough attention is how the Conservatives in 1983  had the police dig dirt on CND to discredit Labour—that’s straight out of the tin-pot dictatorship play book. But another thing that you see, and I say this in the book, is that the secrecy around it creates this glamour and this air of exciting spy stuff—but in fact so much of it is incredibly bureaucratic. For these officers to be sent undercover you have this whole employment structure of handlers, and people who are filing the reports, and a budget line that is coming from the Home Office that they have to justify every year so that people keep their jobs. I hadn’t really thought about that part and there’s so much of it in the disclosure that I got around Mark, things about expenses and management, and I’m sure there’s way more that was not disclosed just because the court didn’t think it was relevant. So on the one hand there’s the deep state and the ideological war that is being waged on the progressive left, then on the other hand you have all this petty middle-management and people trying to keep their jobs. The other thing that the inquiry is giving us is this incredible history of social movements— because the cops were everywhere and writing everything down. The Special Demonstration Squad was set up in 1968 after the riots in Grosvenor Square against the Vietnam War, and ran right up until 2008, so forty years. And sure a lot of it is wrong or misunderstood, or they’ve reported on really weird and inappropriate stuff, but the overall picture you get of political movements right the way across the left is absolutely fascinating.   An interesting example was the Brixton riots in 1981. And the intelligence around that is really interesting because what they basically say is ‘there’s no one you could have spied on to stop this happening’, this was a spontaneous outbreak of community anger, essentially in response to the police’s Operation Swamp and the general racism and brutalised policing that was taking place. But did you know, what the Met actually did was try to blame the anarchists. Scotland Yard basically did a press release saying violent anarchists kicked off the riots in Brixton, and they arrested and prosecuted some people from the squats in Brixton, but at the same time the spycops in the field were basically saying ‘you do realise that these people had nothing to do with making Brixton happen?’. But there’s also a whole bunch of stuff that we’re not even seeing, I suspect because the police didn’t get a look in and it was being handled by MI5. So the miners’ strike we saw almost nothing about. You talk about a ‘game of broken telephone’ in terms of how intelligence gets more and more politicised as it goes up the pipeline. Can you say more about that? So this is the process where raw intelligence goes into intelligence reports for internal consumption, and from there it gets passed on, ‘sanitised’ they call it, into higher level documents that are going to senior police officers, the Home Office and wherever else. And the language changes, and the mischaracterisations get more stark as you go higher up the chain. The really classic example is that you have lots of intelligence about hunt supporters violently assaulting hunt saboteurs. And then you move to read the funding applications and the annual reports, the authorisation documents that are being passed up the chain to be signed off by senior officers, commissioners, Home Office. And now they say things like ‘Hunt sabotage causes significant problems for police in many areas, often resulting in violent assaults including grievous bodily harm’—just not who harmed who. So the statement is not untrue but if you read that underlying intelligence you understand that there is some very creative editing going on here, and that happens a lot. Or the police could know that an attempt to get into Drax power station and get up on the buckets intends to do no damage, but that will be recorded in their early intelligence but left out of the reporting about  ‘attacks on British infrastructure’. Because they need to make themselves sound important. What about your political insights? What would you say today to people who might, for example, talk about the “illusions” of democracy and human rights? I’d say that those illusions are actually quite politically important. These days I find myself talking a lot about human rights and about democracy, because what I discovered is that if you believe you already live in a police state and just allow those illusions to die, then you increase the available space for the police state to expand. The fact that the general population is quite attached to the idea that they live in a free country with human rights and democracy is really fuckin’ important. And I totally remember us being like ‘well you know it’s the police, it’s just what they do’—and that’s not OK, you need people to believe that human rights and democracy are important otherwise the state just gets away with trampling all over society. Those things just weren’t in question in the same way that they are now, yes they were coming after protest but we had a lot more political space, even with the Criminal Justice Act and the 2001 Terrorism Act. Last question: do you think they’re still at it? I mean the sexual relationships specifically. The short answer is ‘yes I do’. I don’t have any particular evidence for that, but I believe that they’re still doing it. It’s still a legal grey area around sexual relationships. There are instructions to undercover officers to not have sex with people that they’re spying on, but there is no law that prohibits it, and in fact the CHIS Act basically makes anything that they’re authorised to do lawful, however illegal. Kate Wilson and Uri Gordon in 2004 The police have also said they’re no longer sending undercover officers to spy on political movements—which may be true, it may be a straight-up lie—but what we also know is that Martin Hogbin was uncovered at the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, and he was a corporate spy working for British Aerospace. There was also a corporate spy we know in London Rising Tide, these are private contractors who were hired by the companies that we’re protesting against. So my big question is, if the police are no longer sending officers to spy on these groups—who is? Are the police paying private contractors to provide them with intelligence? Are companies bypassing the police and just going straight in? At the same time, I think the digital age has changed a lot about how people organise politically, and probably also around how spying happens. I hope that the work that we’re doing means people are more aware and it is less easy to spy on groups, but yeah my gut feeling is that they haven’t stopped. Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files by Kate Wilson. W&N, 2025. 352pp. ISBN 978-1399614290 The post Holding back the police state: Interview with Kate Wilson appeared first on Freedom News.

THE FORMER POLITICAL PRISONER TALKS ABOUT HIS ANARCHISM, THE 325 PROJECT AND RESISTING THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL JAILS THAT SURROUND US ALL. ~ Interviewed by Elizabeth Vasileva ~ You recently spoke about the importance of solidarity and connections, between prisoners and with their supporters on the outside. Can you give us any examples of this kind of mutual or collective empowerment in the pushback against prison’s continuous repression? Shortly before I was released in 2024, violent cell searches by a tactical unit of prison guards known as the National Search Team took place on C-wing of HMP Garth in Leyland, where I was being held. The NST took over the wing with dogs and riot gear. Cell by cell the raid took place with a lot of pointlessly brutal drama. In ones and twos we were handcuffed and placed in a locked wet room. Some prisoners were beaten, abused and a lot of our things were trashed. Some of the guys fought back, flooded their cells, banged their doors or played music really loud as a protest. The next day the whole wing refused to go back into their cells after the early morning unlock hour. As a cacophonous and unruly mob we demanded the immediate return of seized items, the replacement of damaged items and denounced the violence. This lead to the screws backing off. There was nothing at that moment that the screws could do because we all acted together, and without any leader. At the end of the lunch period, the stop-out ended. Similar things happened in my experience when one of the prisoners was killed by depression or hopelessness. Demonstrations outside the prisons where I was held also were a strong experience that had an impact upon the guards and us. Especially when the fireworks exploded across the night sky and the comrades outside were militant. I found other prisoners to be generally supportive of each other in the roughly anti-system and criminal environment. Whenever I was transferred or moved to a different cell, the local guys usually would come to check if I was okay and if I needed anything. I helped other guys with their legal cases or prison admin, and tried to find common points of interest and subversion. We’d try to back each other, and if I had some problem, the guys would be voicing their demands too. There’s refusals and kick-offs being made in most of the prisons around the country each day about conditions and treatment. I lost track of the number of prison labour refusals and walkouts I heard about when I was inside, they are very common, as is getting on the netting that separates the landings to protest about treatment and poor conditions. When I heard that comrades outside were carrying out revolutionary solidarity, that is when I felt our power inside the prison, I can say. From hearing about the direct actions with the Adream case in Chile, France, Italy, Indonesia and around the world, to the phone-call interventions that I was able to make from inside prison to meetings of comrades on the outside, I could feel the warmth from the comrades. Also knowing about the censored letters and books, the solidarity funds and benefit events, it was great. For readers who don’t know 325, what can you tell us about the project and its content? 325 is an anarchist network of counter-information and direct action. In November 2020, Dutch counter-terrorist police took down the nostate.net server which held the 325 website, upon request from their German and English colleagues. The website was a long-running information clearing house of general news, reports, communiques, publications, event listings, etc. Mostly the website covered Europe, Latin America and South East Asia. 325 is also a hard-copy magazine which comes out on an intermittent basis, and dozens of publications have been published by the collective, including the newsletter Dark Nights, which has it’s own website. Over the years, 325 has participated in an evolving participatory international network based on direct action and the support of prisoners, as well as providing space for various tendencies of anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-civilisation groups. In recent issues of the magazine the analysis has shifted slightly to the profound new industrial changes in production and technology, such as artificial intelligence, life sciences and automation. The archive of the 325 site is an important document of social and armed revolutionary struggle over a number of years in Europe and internationally. The project started in 2003 and continues. I first saw the term ‘anti-psychiatry’ in 325. There is a lot to say about the intersections of this agenda with anarchism, but you could also just tell us about why at the time you thought it was important to bring it forward. It was a collective decision that was formed from different influences on the early group in Brighton. I can mention our experience of altered states of consciousness and the shattering of imposed social conditioning. Some of our original group had experience of psychiatric/psychological controls and secure units, and we were all interested in the use of psychoanalysis for political repression, the work of Wilhelm Reich, R D Laing, the Socialist Patients Collective (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv – SPK), and anarchist analysis of the relationship of the individual to post-industrial society. Our comrade from Switzerland, who took part in an early anti-civilisation network in Europe in the 2000s, wrote the anti-psychiatry manifesto Reclaim Your Mind: An Urgent Message for all those who have or are in danger of being labelled mentally ill, which features in the first 325 magazine. Whilst there have been some different perspectives on this manifesto in the collective over the years, overall the position taken is that society drives pathology, medicalisation is ultimately harmful, as is incarceration. At the Anti-repression gathering organised by the Anarchist Black Cross at the Cowley Club in Brighton last March, a comrade from Sweden described how comrades are being placed into psychiatric care rather than prison by the authorities, thereby trying to de-politicise their cases in the spotlight of the public arena and forcing them into medical ‘treatment’ for their anarchist ideas. It was a tactic that the National Security Team and the Counter-Terrorist Police tried to apply to me during my incarceration and when I was released under controls. It is very important to bring this forward as these kinds of controls are being used routinely by these agencies, and they will seek to apply this to anarchists and the radical left where they can. Legislation is continuously narrowing the scope for non-violent expression of discontent, with harsher sentences for mass- or even small-group disruption, and police powers to disperse non-violent crowds. While Climate Camp organisers were pre-emptively raided, the far right attacks last summer were not foiled. How come the British state is so obsessed with the crumbs of resistance from below in the middle of a global fascist takeover? Well, we can never underestimate the smallest expression of dissent and rebellion, they all have power. If the regime doesn’t suppress the sparks, the wildfires will begin. Even if I disagree with the positions of the bureaucratic part of most of these groups, it gives me pleasure to see their successes and I want to see it escalate into a revolutionary movement. Any protests that are effective will meet repression. From prison I saw on TV the escalation of property destruction against arms companies dealing to Israel during the ongoing Gaza genocide, the shutdowns of the motorways and destruction of Barclays Banks. The radical left, ecologists and anarchists are basically the only opposition in the UK. Since it was wrong-footed by June 18th Global Day of Action in 1999, when the London Met were surprised by multi-million pound damage anti-capitalist riots, the state has made it its goal to manipulate and dead-end the social movement. The question of tactics and energy inside the movement, of small group actions and of mass protests that could have the capacity to pose a real danger to national security through creating situations that are out of the control of anyone- that requires our willingness to organise and link our struggles, that’s our challenge. If we want a revolution, that will require continuous subversion and insurrection. This system is invested in war, murder and genocide, it’s not going to be stopped by voting or protests alone. The British state has always been part of the global fascist takeover, the regime is constantly preparing for urban riots, acts of terror, individual and mass revolts. The comrades who often form part of the underground groups, they usually come through the social movement, and so the state will invest a lot of time and energy into looking into who forms part of these movements and which directions these movements are taking. The British left seems so divided over internal issues, accelerating burnout and further fragmentation. How do you think we can build solidarity effectively and support each other, inside or outside the criminal penal system? I don’t consider myself part of the British left, nor do the comrades in our circle. Leftism is part of the electioneering circus, and has capitulated to the mass media and corporations, to militarism, high-technologies, trans-humanism, nuclear energy, statism. That being said, I don’t think you’re speaking about this. Our group withdrew from the social movement in 2011 and took a nihilistic position, we are only active in our groups and not in the social centres or the activist campaigns. That’s another conversation, but from what we have been through, essentially; stop pointlessly fighting with each other over toxic issues and excluding each other. Understand how the system constantly recuperates and infiltrates our anarchism. Learn to communicate with each other. Learn from your interactions with each other. Learn to value your time and that of others. Share skills, time, energy and money, if you can, with real projects that need support. Learn to give criticism and to receive it. Learn to sever ties and forge them. If you cannot work well with others, work alone. Put your ideas into practice. This will strengthen our space. If you are part of a group or not, you can write to prisoners, support their campaigns and maintain an interest in the anti-prison topic. Meet face-to-face and do things in the streets if you are able. Make links in the local area and if you are active on other issues, remember those who end up behind bars, it could be you. If you have the capabilities, help do admin or organise demos, cooking, putting people up, flyposting, graffiti, leaflets, zines, stickers, night time excursions. Don’t think that other people are going to do it for you, do it yourself. If you can’t do any of those things, live your life in the most beautiful and free way you can, and don’t give up on your dreams. Let’s take part in and build a real culture of resistance and mutual aid. What is the most effective way to show solidarity and support people who are in prison or have recently come out of it? What did you find most helpful? The revolutionary action, this is the most important way to support people inside. This is the first principle. Directly freeing the prisoners and carrying out the anti-state and anti-capitalist struggle. Second are the material conditions of imprisonment. It costs money to fight legal cases, pay for food and provisions, pay for visits, travel to the prison, arrange the situation of the life left behind outside etc. This can’t be done by the prisoner at all. It needs a collective effort. When prisoners are released they continue to need support with housing, money, travel, food and so on. Police, probation and the parole board have more power over an individual if they do not have support from their close ones or the movement. On release I was helped a great deal by my comrades who provided me with money, a vehicle, housing, clothes etc. Third is the solidarity campaign and raising awareness to large numbers of people. This campaigning must include also making sure that the imprisoned know about what is happening on the outside and putting pressure on the prison administration, or any private companies involved. When I was locked up, I was not able to receive much news, due to the censorship I was imposed with, but whenever I heard about a demo or a solidarity action it always provided me with a lot of strength, and to be able to speak about it with the other guys enabled me to show practically that the anarchists exist. We have to prepare for larger numbers of us going to prison, I read that currently there are dozens of prisoners from the social movement—climate change and Palestinian solidarity. They are facing the same or similar conditions I was imposed with, through the terrorism schedules and Counter Terror Police investigations. In my case I was not even sentenced for any terror charges but I was still held under an anti-terrorist regime and there was nothing really that either the lawyers or the movement could do about that. This situation is not going to get better unless we are active and create a stronger tendency of struggle. Currently the anarchist movement in the UK is not able to provide adequate support to its prisoners. The solidarity action groups are almost non-existent. There needs to be a real effort to connect the struggles of all of us who are targeted by the prison and criminal-justice system. You spoke about abolishing prisons in your talk and the horrendous living conditions inside. Do you think that is one of the main areas anarchists should be focusing on? What are the important battles for our movement in the next few years? Everyone will have different areas they want to concentrate on, but yes, I think that the anti-prison topic is an important intermediate struggle that has the capacity to not only create significant damage to bourgeois society, national security and the police-state, but create experience in confronting very difficult issues and finding allies in working class communities. Prison has a clear racial and class basis and at the moment the prison system is breaking, the situation is not going to be resolved any time soon either. A start could be the fight against prison labour and the construction of new prisons. As anarchists, we don’t want to simply abolish prisons, but destroy the state itself, in this case an old decaying post-Imperial regime that is determined to never relinquish its power. So, I’m in favour of any actions and campaigns from the radical left and the anarchists that strike it. The social movement has been largely active on the same issues for years with little success, most of the battles we face now, we will still face in the future, but it is made more bitter by the neo-fascist atmosphere and the new technologies. The important social battles I see coming all pertain to poverty and exploitation, and are the results of the new asymmetric state of war, technocratic capital, rising artificial intelligence and the ecological collapse. I think that nothing should be taken for granted. We live in a changing world and the resurgence of internationalist struggle and the next generation of social war is what I am placing a bet on. Thank you for your time. Strength to everyone. For a black international. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Freedom Journal The post Wildfires will begin: An interview with Toby Shone appeared first on Freedom News.

WE ARE STILL IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE REGIME’S COLLAPSE, BUT SYRIANS ARE ALREADY ORGANISING THEMSELVES ~ From Lundi Matin via Autonomies ~ Leila al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab are the authors of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, an important book in which they recounted the early years of the revolution and the profusion of experiments in popular self-organisation. We interviewed them in 2016 and 2019. The following interview is not an interview in its own right, but rather a sort of addendum to the previous ones. When we interviewed you in 2019, you said that the Syrian people were facing several forms of fascism, that of the regime of course, but also that of certain Islamist rebel groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTC). Do you think that HTC has changed since then, at least strategically? HTC has changed quite dramatically over the years. It has moved away from its roots in al-Qaeda, which was a transnational jihadist organisation, and transformed itself into a Syrian nationalist Islamist project. Joulani seems to be a pragmatist. He has a lot of experience in building institutions of governance, as he has ruled Idlib since 2017 through the Syrian Salvation Government. The Idlib government was made up of civilian technocrats appointed by the shura council, rather than democratically elected, and included no women in leadership positions. They were responsible for providing services, distributing humanitarian aid in coordination with international organisations and ensuring security. They did this under very difficult conditions, and Idlib and its economy were more stable than elsewhere in Syria, so they enjoyed some popular support. But they remained an autocratic and authoritarian force. While people had more freedoms in Idlib than in the regime-controlled areas, over the years we have seen continuous protests in Idlib against the HTS regime, due to the silencing of opponents, the imprisonment of critics and reports of abuses in prisons. Since the overthrow of Assad, Jolani has clearly been trying to build popular and international legitimacy. He has reached out to minority communities (both religious minorities and Kurds) to reassure them of their future in the country. He has issued decrees banning any interference with women’s dress. Many Syrians feel reassured by these measures, but many are also cautious. We must not forget that this is a transitional government. The question now is to what extent other players, including progressive and democratic forces, will be involved in Syria’s future. And to what extent will another popular movement emerge from below to hold the leaders to account and continue to make progress towards the original objectives of the revolution? How do you explain the sudden fall of the Assad regime? Some see it as the victory of an armed and organised militia supported by Turkey and having taken advantage of the weakening of Hezbollah. Others see it as the continuation and reactivation of the revolutionary process and stress the importance of local and popular uprisings in this victory. Are we witnessing a change of regime or a decisive stage in a longer revolutionary process? I see it as both. The fall of the regime was a decisive event. It marks the end of a horrible era of brutality in Syria’s history. It also offers a tremendous opportunity to re-launch civil activism and may lead to the continuation of the revolutionary process. Today, Syrians are flocking from all over the world to return to Syria. Many of these revolutionaries have never given up on their dreams and have also learned a great deal from their experience of organising in exile and their contact with different political cultures. Already, many initiatives are taking shape, and there are now opportunities and hope, which Syrians have not had for many years, despite the many challenges we still have to overcome. A few years ago, you wrote an important text, The anti-imperialism of idiots, in which you denounced the failure of a certain Left that stubbornly refused to understand anything about the Syrian revolution by trying to translate it into its own dusty, out-of-touch categories. Nevertheless, the geopolitical maelstrom in which Syria finds itself today raises the question of how this is likely to affect the political situation now and in the future. My main fear for Syria’s future is the interference of foreign states, in particular Israel and Turkey. These states represent an enormous threat to the country’s future. But Syrians will continue to fight imperialism as they have fought Russian and Iranian imperialism in recent years. Perhaps now that the imperialisms they are fighting are not popular with part of the ‘anti-imperialist’ left, they will get more support for their struggle. But in fighting imperialism, we must not erase the Syrians on the ground. We should listen to them and learn from them. Geopolitics is only part of the story. At the end of the day, the future of Syria will be decided by the Syrians and nobody else. The last two weeks have taught us that. That’s why people need to stand in solidarity with the progressive and democratic forces on the ground, to make sure they have more strength and can counterbalance the many counter-revolutionary forces we face. In the 13 years between now and the start of the Syrian revolution, many political experiments have succeeded one another, have been fought over and have overlapped. First there were the local councils and their coordination committees, which organised themselves horizontally in the face of the need to survive the regime’s repression and its abandonment or flight from whole swathes of the country. There is Rojava, which is trying to organise the communalism advocated by the PKK but also controlled by it. And of course there is the Islamic State, a fascist theocracy. Each of these experiments, whether they have been wiped out or are struggling to survive, contains an imaginary world, a system of desire and an interpretation of the world that have necessarily outlived them. In the same way that the Paris Commune, 150 years later, still inspires our imaginations. What do you think remains of this today in Syria? Do any of them seem renewable  or desirable to you, or are we witnessing a completely new situation? We are still in the early days of the regime’s collapse, but Syrians are already organising themselves. The revolutionary experience may have been crushed, but it is never dead. It lives on in the Syrians who lived it, and it has changed us forever. The experience of local coordination committees and local councils across Syria is rich in lessons. The same is true of the experience of the Kurdish-controlled regions in northern Syria, which has continued to this day, even though it is now under threat. I believe that over the coming months we will see the Syrians revive and continue this legacy, the question being whether the world will support them. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lundi Matin 456, 16 December 2024. Translation by Julius Gavroche The post Leila Al-Shami: “The future of Syria will be decided by the Syrians and nobody else” appeared first on Freedom News.

GRZEGORZ PIOTROWSKI DISCUSSES FAR RIGHT POWER AND ITS INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING AND FUNDING ~ Uri Gordon ~ The far right agenda has never been so powerful since the end of the second World War. After decades of the political centre shifting steadily to the right, ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist forces are now in open alliance with populist and conservative parties around the world, or setting the tone within them. In Israel they have taken over the country and launched a regional war following the genocide in Gaza. In the USA they remain poised to stage a coup whatever the election results, but in either case far right ascendance is far from over. Repelled for now in France, in Austria they recently became the largest parliamentary party. To talk about far right power and its international networking and funding, we spoke to Grzegorz Piotrowski, a sociologist at the university of Gdansk and the European Solidarity Centre. The answers have been edited for brevity and clarity. While the political and business elites, and especially the right wing press in Britain, are busy spreading xenophobia and calling for tighter borders, those same elites and their attack dogs have no problem working across borders. We talk about our internationalism, but what about theirs? I mean that’s nothing new, right? Even before World War II they were quite international. But if 15 years ago extreme right groups were deeply rooted in their local context, now they have gained very powerful allies, especially allies that have a lot of money. At the CPAC conference in Budapest you can actually see this ‘far right International’ — Tucker Carlson, Viktor Orban, Russians cannot travel that much anymore but you have people from all over the world, even European Parliament members. But then you can observe the flow of cash and there are a lot of far-right groups that are financed by Western millionaires or the Kremlin. In Poland there are a lot of Twitter accounts that everybody knows are financed by Russia, they were sponsoring the far right in in Austria and Italy, and with groups fighting against reproductive rights you can trace cash flows from Brazil. So are ‘gender ideology’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ coming instead of open racial hatred, or just ideological covers? I think the base layer is a kind of simulacrum of white male Christian identity, so Islamophobia or antisemitism is a big part of that but it doesn’t work out the same way in all countries. The same with homophobia, I mean in Poland and Hungary it’s quite effective but in the UK not really, but this then allows them to play the ‘crusades and conquerors’ card. In addition to the welfare chauvinism card. But this is all about how you create the ‘other’ that doesn’t match, ethnically, culturally, to your homeland, the ‘sacred homeland’ that is supposed to contain the formative values of the nation. Recently it was exposed that American neo-nazis had helped start a chain of ‘brown gyms’ far right training clubs in England called Active Club. Are there other cross-border connections, say with the European continent? I know there was the English Defence League — Polish Division and then there was the Polish Defence League — English Division, that created a lot of confusion. The Football Lads Alliance try to use their networks to see who is now in the UK, etc., but these are really really marginalised groups. But in general what is helping the far right internationalise is they all moved to social media, especially now that platforms like X are weaponising ‘freedom of speech’. This was very evident with the Capitol Hill uprising, this scare that was created online translated into real action. So I don’t know how conscious people from the Trump camp actually were of how it might end up, I think they underestimated the power of social media in this case, but you could see that vast array of groups like the QAnon, the identitarians, the Proud Boys \and so on, they all met at the Capitol Hill because of this scare that was created by Trump’s acolytes online. Let’s go back to the contrast between their ‘internationalism’ and their racism. Are leaders like Orban in Hungary or Meloni in Italy really motivated by hatred of this ‘other’ that they stoke up? This is actually a very convenient tool to seize power, because it plays on the really low instincts of this society, and in a globalising world there are more and more people coming in. But the interesting thing is that you don’t really need to have refugees or migrants coming in to stoke xenophobia, you just create the image. People read that there are big movements of people from areas of civil war or poverty etc., and you can easily make a scarecrow out of that in order to seize power. I think this is a very cynical play. I think many leaders or at least their close supporters are not actually ideological about it, they’re just using these tropes because they think they work. And what happens after a couple of years is that you see they’re trying to use this power not for some ideological purposes but that it’s basically a kleptocracy. You see that in Hungary, most of the businesses are now owned or run by friends of Viktor Orban, in Poland every day there is a new scandal around stealing money from the state budget, if Bolsonaro were in power longer that would be obviously the case, also in Argentina. I’m pretty sure that lot of people from the immediate surroundings of the leaders are there only for the money and power. As for the leaders themselves, I don’t know to be honest, some of them might really feel they have a mission, but it’s quite often just to to seize power and whatever comes with it, usually money. But that still causes the mainstreaming of ideas and attitudes that used to be associated only with the far right, and we’re seeing how dangerous that can be. That’s actually something that I’ve noticed recently when I was talking to parents at my children’s school, and it’s sometimes in form of a joke or something like that, but you can see the spread of this xenophobic agenda in very ‘moderate’ terms throughout the middle class. You know, they were making jokes about lots of engineers and doctors coming on boats from North Africa to Europe, and this always comes with a small wink and so on. This is actually a ‘light’ version of what the far right is saying, and this scare about migrants and refugees is being extrapolated throughout the societies. So far I haven’t seen any tool to combat this, to highlight things like the fact that the only rise in crime that happens after refugees come is in the crimes committed by the far right against the refugees, or against people who help the refugees. This is a challenge I actually think will need to be addressed in the next couple of years both by the movement but also I think by the policymakers to start pushing the anti-fascist agenda to middle class people. Do you think anti-fascist groups are maybe less internationally networked than the far right? Are people absorbed in local struggles? It’s a question, how actively interested people are in what’s happening in other countries, because in some cases there are so many things going on in your home country that you don’t even have time to look around at what is happening in the region or the continent, right? I mean we had that in Poland for eight years where the Polish government was quite annoying, especially to activists, and there were a lot of protest campaigns and a lot of people in the street. But there’s so many things happening locally that people didn’t have time to look at what’s happening in Germany or beyond our eastern border because people were so busy dealing with these things on their own. So what can you say about resisting the far-right internationally? When you look at attempts to combat those initiatives they’re very much locally based, it is about people protecting their own communities. For example in the US, for many years anti-fascist politics was really scarce after Anti-Racist Action kind of slowed down, there was no militant anti-fascism. Trump comes to power and you have people like Richard Spencer and others, and suddenly you have a revival of militant antifa. Nowadays, a lot of the American anti-fascist movement is community based, and it actually appeals to the communities saying that these people are a threat to our community which is diverse, migrant based, LGBT friendly or whatever other issue the far right is targeting. And I think that is actually a big power. The second thing is that the far right is picking up on economic and social agendas that the left abandoned, protecting working families, a safer job environment, or restoring dignity by raising the minimum wage. These are leftist claims but the social democratic and liberal parties have embraced neoliberalism. I think today the mainstream parties’ language is incomprehensible to the younger generation of activists, they want to push their own agenda which is a leftist agenda and they see threats to their agenda coming from the far right, so that’s why they are becoming anti-right or even anti-fascist. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal The post “You can actually see this ‘far right international’ taking shape” appeared first on Freedom News.

URI GORDON INTERVIEWS GRZEGORZ PIOTROWSKI The far right agenda has never been so powerful since the end of the second World War. After decades of the political centre shifting steadily to the right, ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist forces are now in open alliance with populist and conservative parties around the world, or setting the tone within them. In Israel they have taken over the country and launched a regional war following the genocide in Gaza. In the USA they remain poised to stage a coup whatever the election results, but in either case far right ascendance is far from over. Repelled for now in France, in Austria they recently became the largest parliamentary party. To talk about far right power and its international networking and funding, we spoke to Grzegorz Piotrowski, a sociologist at the university of Gdansk and the European Solidarity Centre. The answers have been edited for brevity and clarity. While the political and business elites, and especially the right wing press in Britain, are busy spreading xenophobia and calling for tighter borders, those same elites and their attack dogs have no problem working across borders. We talk about our internationalism, but what about theirs? I mean that’s nothing new, right? Even before World War II they were quite international. But if 15 years ago extreme right groups were deeply rooted in their local context, now they have gained very powerful allies, especially allies that have a lot of money. At the CPAC conference in Budapest you can actually see this ‘far right International’ — Tucker Carlson, Viktor Orban, Russians cannot travel that much anymore but you have people from all over the world, even European Parliament members. But then you can observe the flow of cash and there are a lot of far-right groups that are financed by Western millionaires or the Kremlin. In Poland there are a lot of Twitter accounts that everybody knows are financed by Russia, they were sponsoring the far right in in Austria and Italy, and with groups fighting against reproductive rights you can trace cash flows from Brazil. So are ‘gender ideology’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ coming instead of open racial hatred, or just ideological covers? I think the base layer is a kind of simulacrum of white male Christian identity, so Islamophobia or antisemitism is a big part of that but it doesn’t work out the same way in all countries. The same with homophobia, I mean in Poland and Hungary it’s quite effective but in the UK not really, but this then allows them to play the ‘crusades and conquerors’ card. In addition to the welfare chauvinism card. But this is all about how you create the ‘other’ that doesn’t match, ethnically, culturally, to your homeland, the ‘sacred homeland’ that is supposed to contain the formative values of the nation. Recently it was exposed that American neo-nazis had helped start a chain of ‘brown gyms’ far right training clubs in England called Active Club. Are there other cross-border connections, say with the European continent? I know there was the English Defence League — Polish Division and then there was the Polish Defence League — English Division, that created a lot of confusion. The Football Lads Alliance try to use their networks to see who is now in the UK, etc., but these are really really marginalised groups. But in general what is helping the far right internationalise is they all moved to social media, especially now that platforms like X are weaponising ‘freedom of speech’. This was very evident with the Capitol Hill uprising, this scare that was created online translated into real action. So I don’t know how conscious people from the Trump camp actually were of how it might end up, I think they underestimated the power of social media in this case, but you could see that vast array of groups like the QAnon, the identitarians, the Proud Boys \and so on, they all met at the Capitol Hill because of this scare that was created by Trump’s acolytes online. Let’s go back to the contrast between their ‘internationalism’ and their racism. Are leaders like Orban in Hungary or Meloni in Italy really motivated by hatred of this ‘other’ that they stoke up? This is actually a very convenient tool to seize power, because it plays on the really low instincts of this society, and in a globalising world there are more and more people coming in. But the interesting thing is that you don’t really need to have refugees or migrants coming in to stoke xenophobia, you just create the image. People read that there are big movements of people from areas of civil war or poverty etc., and you can easily make a scarecrow out of that in order to seize power. I think this is a very cynical play. I think many leaders or at least their close supporters are not actually ideological about it, they’re just using these tropes because they think they work. And what happens after a couple of years is that you see they’re trying to use this power not for some ideological purposes but that it’s basically a kleptocracy. You see that in Hungary, most of the businesses are now owned or run by friends of Viktor Orban, in Poland every day there is a new scandal around stealing money from the state budget, if Bolsonaro were in power longer that would be obviously the case, also in Argentina. I’m pretty sure that lot of people from the immediate surroundings of the leaders are there only for the money and power. As for the leaders themselves, I don’t know to be honest, some of them might really feel they have a mission, but it’s quite often just to to seize power and whatever comes with it, usually money. But that still causes the mainstreaming of ideas and attitudes that used to be associated only with the far right, and we’re seeing how dangerous that can be. That’s actually something that I’ve noticed recently when I was talking to parents at my children’s school, and it’s sometimes in form of a joke or something like that, but you can see the spread of this xenophobic agenda in very ‘moderate’ terms throughout the middle class. You know, they were making jokes about lots of engineers and doctors coming on boats from North Africa to Europe, and this always comes with a small wink and so on. This is actually a ‘light’ version of what the far right is saying, and this scare about migrants and refugees is being extrapolated throughout the societies. So far I haven’t seen any tool to combat this, to highlight things like the fact that the only rise in crime that happens after refugees come is in the crimes committed by the far right against the refugees, or against people who help the refugees. This is a challenge I actually think will need to be addressed in the next couple of years both by the movement but also I think by the policymakers to start pushing the anti-fascist agenda to middle class people. Do you think anti-fascist groups are maybe less internationally networked than the far right? Are people absorbed in local struggles? It’s a question, how actively interested people are in what’s happening in other countries, because in some cases there are so many things going on in your home country that you don’t even have time to look around at what is happening in the region or the continent, right? I mean we had that in Poland for eight years where the Polish government was quite annoying, especially to activists, and there were a lot of protest campaigns and a lot of people in the street. But there’s so many things happening locally that people didn’t have time to look at what’s happening in Germany or beyond our eastern border because people were so busy dealing with these things on their own. So what can you say about resisting the far-right internationally? When you look at attempts to combat those initiatives they’re very much locally based, it is about people protecting their own communities. For example in the US, for many years anti-fascist politics was really scarce after Anti-Racist Action kind of slowed down, there was no militant anti-fascism. Trump comes to power and you have people like Richard Spencer and others, and suddenly you have a revival of militant antifa. Nowadays, a lot of the American anti-fascist movement is community based, and it actually appeals to the communities saying that these people are a threat to our community which is diverse, migrant based, LGBT friendly or whatever other issue the far right is targeting. And I think that is actually a big power. The second thing is that the far right is picking up on economic and social agendas that the left abandoned, protecting working families, a safer job environment, or restoring dignity by raising the minimum wage. These are leftist claims but the social democratic and liberal parties have embraced neoliberalism. I think today the mainstream parties’ language is incomprehensible to the younger generation of activists, they want to push their own agenda which is a leftist agenda and they see threats to their agenda coming from the far right, so that’s why they are becoming anti-right or even anti-fascist. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal The post The far-right and their new internationalism appeared first on Freedom News.

IN THIS INTERVIEW, THE FOUNDER OF EDMONTON’S ANARCHIST PUBLISHING HOUSE LOOKS BACK ON ITS LEGACY ~ Sean Patterson ~ For the past five decades, Black Cat Press (BCP) in Edmonton, Canada, has served as a local hub for the city’s radical community and as an important publisher of anarchist material. Over the years, BCP has produced many notable titles, including the first English translations of the collected works of the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno in five volumes. Other stand-out works from BCP include The Dossier of Subject No. 1218, the translated memoirs of Bulgarian anarchist Alexander Nakov; Lazar Lipotkin’s The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America, a previously unpublished manuscript held at Amsterdam’s International Institute of Social History; and Kronstadt Diary, a selection of Alexander Berkman’s original diary entries from 1921. Amongst reprints of classic works by the likes of Kropotkin, Bakunin, and William Morris, BCP has also highlighted the work of anarchist researchers from around the globe, including Alexey Ivanov’s Kropotkin and Canada, Vadim Damier’s Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century, Ronald Tabor’s The Tyranny of Theory, and Archibald’s own work Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc.   Sadly, Black Cat Press closed its doors in 2022, an economic victim of the Covid pandemic. Any future hopes to revive the press were subsequently shattered in the wake of a second tragedy. On June 26, 2024, an early morning house fire started by arsonists destroyed BCP’s remaining equipment and inventory. The loss of BCP is painful not only locally for Edmonton but nationally as one of Canada’s few anarchist publishers. Sharing BCP’s five-decade-long story will hopefully inspire others to follow in the steps of BCP’s legacy and the broader tradition of small anarchist publishing houses.    This month, BCP founder Malcolm Archibald sat down with Freedom News to reflect on a lifetime of publishing and his personal journey through anarchism over the years. — You have been involved with the anarchist community for many years. Can you tell us a little about your background and how you first became interested in anarchism? Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the Cold War, I certainly had no exposure to anarchism. Nor did my family have any predilection for left-wing politics. The only book on socialism in the public library was G. D. H. Cole’s History of Socialist Thought, which I devoured. In 1958, at age 15, I attended a provincial convention of the CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation) as a youth delegate. The CCF in Nova Scotia was a proletarian party with a strong base in the coal mining districts. After that, I was hooked on left-wing politics. I became interested in anarchism by reading books about the Spanish Civil War. The first real anarchist I met was Murray Bookchin at a conference in Ann Arbor in 1969. Bookchin understood that many student radicals were anarchists in practice, even if they called themselves Marxists, so he emphasised the libertarian elements of Marx in his propaganda. What anarchist organisations/groups have you been involved with over the years? As a graduate student at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, I was on the staff of underground newspapers, including an anarchist tabloid, The Walrus. Later, I helped start an anarchist magazine in Edmonton called News from Nowhere (printed by Black Cat Press). In Edmonton in the 1970s we had a branch of the Social-Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (SRAF), but most anarchist activity was centred around the IWW, Black Cat Press, and Erewhon Books. Anarchists were also involved in the newspapers Poundmaker (circulation 19,000!) and Prairie Star. In 1979, the North American Anarchist Communist Federation (NAACF, later simplified to ACF) started up, and I was active in two of their branches for a number of years but was unable to get much traction for the organisation in Edmonton. When did you start Black Cat Press, and how did it evolve over time? What are some key moments in its history you’d like to share with our readers? Black Cat Press started when I purchased an offset press and copy camera in 1972. The previous owner had tried to earn a living with this equipment and ended up in a mental institution, which was not auspicious. BCP became a “printer to the movement” in Edmonton, used by almost all the left groups and causes. In 1979 BCP became the unofficial printer of the ACF and printed a number of pamphlets for that organisation. From 1989 to 2001, BCP shared space with the Boyle McCauley News, the monthly newspaper of Edmonton’s inner city, with an all-volunteer staff. The newspaper generally tried to print positive news about the community, but an exception was the issue of juvenile prostitution, a terrible blight until we started printing stories about it and the authorities finally took action. In 1994, the government printing plant where I worked was shut down, and BCP began to operate full-time with three partners who had been laid off at the same time. Our customer base included social agencies close to our shop in Edmonton’s inner city plus various unions. In 2003, I purchased a perfect binding machine and was able to start printing books. Our first book was Kropotkin’s Anarchist Morality, a perennial favourite. Eventually, about 30 titles were printed, which were distributed by AK Press, independent bookstores, and literature tables at anarchist book fairs. How did you come to translate Russian-language radical and anarchist texts? I studied Russian at university and later took night courses in German, French, Ukrainian, and Polish. I first became aware of Nestor Makhno in the 1960s from a book by the British historian David Footman. Ending up in Edmonton, it turned out that the University of Alberta Library held four books by Nestor Makhno, bibliographical rarities. I’m constantly amazed at the richness of the anarchist tradition in the Russian Empire and the USSR. For many years, The Russian Anarchists by Paul Avrich was the only survey work on the subject, but recently, two histories have appeared in Russia and one in Ukraine. It is a measure of the depth of the movement that these histories are practically independent of one another and pay hardly any attention to Avrich. My first works of translation from Russian were physics articles, which don’t give much scope for originality. In translating historical texts, most of the effort goes not into the actual translation, but research on the names of places, persons, etc. and preparing annotations. I try to provide the reader with maps, graphics, and indexes, which make it easier to understand the text. Although I generally do not work with literary texts, I did translate some poems by Nestor Makhno. He wrote a poem called “The Summons” while in prison in 1912. A search of his cell in 1914 discovered this poem, for which he was given one week in a punishment cell. While in this cell, he composed another poem, which he wrote down as soon as he was allowed back to his regular cell. But another search discovered the second poem (more bloodthirsty than the first one), and he ended up in the punishment cell again. So, it wasn’t easy being an anarchist poet! Some of your major contributions to anarchist studies are the translations of Russian and Ukrainian primary sources. In particular, you translated and published the first English edition of Nestor Makhno’s three-volume memoirs. Can you describe this translation project? The University of Alberta library holds copies of Makhno’s memoirs, including both the French and Russian versions of the first volume. I started translating these memoirs as early as 1979 when BCP published a pamphlet entitled My Visit to the Kremlin, a translation of two chapters in the second volume. This pamphlet was eventually published in many other languages. Most of the work involved in preparing translations of Makhno’s works went into research about the people and places he mentions. An effort was made to provide enough material in the form of notes and maps to make the narrative intelligible to the reader. Black Cat Press recently closed its doors after fifty years in business. The economic environment for publishing is increasingly difficult in general, and especially so for small anarchist presses. What are your thoughts on the current prospects for anarchist publishing, and what changes might have to be made to maintain its long-term viability? Most anarchist publishers have to order a substantial press run up front and then hope to sell the books over a (hopefully) not-too-long period. BCP was ahead of its time in using a print-on-demand model where inventories were kept low so that capital wouldn’t be tied up in stock that wasn’t moving. The publishing arm of BCP was not much affected by the pandemic; rather, it was the job printing that suffered, forcing the business to close. How have you seen anarchism (particularly in Canada) change over the decades? Canada has rarely seen an organized anarchist movement in the same way as some groups in Europe or the United States. Why do you think this is so, and do you see any hope for an organized Canadian movement in the future? When I became active in the anarchist movement in Canada in the 1970s, the anarchists were all poverty-stricken, trying to survive in minimum-wage jobs. The next generation was much better off and had a lot of money to throw around. Now, the current generation is back to being dirt poor again, lacking the resources to make an impact. But I think the prospects for the future are good because (a) the old left (communists, Trotskyists, i.e., the alphabet soup brigade) are intellectually and morally bankrupt, and (b) the New Democratic Party (in Alberta, at least) is environmentally irresponsible. This leaves a lot of room on the left for anarchists to stake out their territory and attract young people into the movement. Malcolm Archibald at the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair, 2013. Thanks to Kandis Friesen for sharing previously collected interview material. The post Malcolm Archibald: 50 years of Black Cat Press appeared first on Freedom News.

INTERVIEW WITH LEBANESE ACTIVIST MAROUN, AN ACTIVE PARTICIPANT IN THE 2019 POPULAR UPRISING IN LEBANON ~ From Aftoleksi ~ Let’s pick up the thread from 2019, when many young people in Western countries heard about the Lebanese world for the first time. You are from the young generation that made the grand uprising in Lebanon in October that year which lasted until May 2020. What were your demands then and what was the reason for the popular uprising? The reason for the popular uprising then was the economic crisis. The Central Bank of Lebanon was taking the people’s deposits from their bank accounts and investing them in unknown assets to enrich an elite who ruled the Central Bank. The local banks, in return, took huge sums in Lebanese pounds at exorbitant interest rates to act as middlemen. In 2019, from September onwards, the banks started not allowing people to withdraw from their accounts and the Lebanese pound started to lose value against the dollar. So the people rose up by taking to the streets to demonstrate for better conditions. There were not so much specific demands as a general spirit of social revolt. There were occupations of public spaces that had been privatised. Many people from different religions and political backgrounds came together to form assemblies and joint actions. People had the opportunity to unite around some issues in the outbreak of the October 17, 2019 revolution. This was a breakthrough, as the Lebanese people are still divided between religion and partisan identity due to the trauma of the 1975-1991 civil war. The movements born in October 2019 managed to bring pressure on the then government and elites, but failed to ultimately bring radical change and unite the people in a meaningful way as the whole movement lost momentum after a few months. At the beginning, the people demonstrating could reach a million, but after the first month the number of people started to decrease to a few thousands. Where do you think the people who were demonstrating like you are today, what could we say is the common feeling today? Too many people have emigrated abroad. Too many young people have since left the country. We don’t know exactly but some sources say that half a million young people have left—with no serious intention of returning. This is a blow to the country and to the movement because these people had the will to put their dreams into practice and as they saw that the mass participation slowly declined from the demonstrations, they became frustrated and left. 2019 Beirut protests. Photo: Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-4.0 The common feeling of class solidarity has diminished somewhat. Significantly, in late October 2019, in the midst of social upheaval, Hezbollah itself ordered its supporters and its fellow believers (who make up at least 30% of the country’s population) to withdraw from the streets and no longer participate in the protests. So fear and insecurity among the partisan-religious groups increased. At the same time, many conflicts and attacks were taking place between people on the street who were supporters of political parties while peaceful demonstrations were taking place. This scared a lot of people from participating and pushed some people back to the way of thinking of fear and hatred of others. Coming to today, what was the situation all these months in Lebanon and what is it now with the Israeli invasion? The situation in the country now is one of widespread fear. One million people have been displaced, mainly from southern Lebanon, populated mainly by Shia Muslims, to the Beirut areas and elsewhere. As there has been tension between the different communities since the civil war period (1975-1991), the displaced people have in fact now gone to areas dominated by other religious and partisan groupings. There is thus growing tension between different sections of the people and with some political factions that are opponents of Hezbollah and have an interest in the latter being defeated in the war now. Israeli airstrike in Beirut. Photo: FMT, CC BY 4.0 It is considered that Lebanon is an open field which is and is not part of the struggle for Palestine, depending on which groups one belongs to. What is the position of the central government in the country in relation to Israel and Palestine? On the other hand, are there forces beyond conservatism and fundamentalism? And if so, what view do they hold about the war now? The central government is made up of political groups—which include Hezbollah and its opponents. So, the government’s position is that Israel is carrying out hostile acts, it is an enemy and must stop the invasion of Lebanon and Palestine. But because the central government is made up of different political groups that have conflicting ideologies and alliances in their foreign policy, it cannot take a meaningful and strong position on any foreign policy issue. The armed wing of the Hezbollah organisation—only their political part is a member of the government—has a harder and more aggressive stance towards Israel, but surprisingly the Lebanese government (which must include all voices in parliament) is in favour of a ceasefire with Israel and a truce. The popular elements, apart from conservatism and fundamentalism, also stand against the war, and for the liberation of Palestine, but they are not well-connected and have not enough contact with the population in general. They have not had much influence on domestic or foreign policy, nor can they organise mass demonstrations at the moment. Unfortunately, in Lebanon all the corrupted parties that came to power after the civil war have kept their authority and suffocating influence by not allowing new currents to come to the fore. Not many of our ideas from the 2019 revolution are still in the forefront today. The central slogans that prevailed then such as the typical “kellon yaane kellon!” (“All of them means all of them!”), meaning that ALL politicians and parties, and not just those of other religious groups, should go away—have been put aside. I would say that there has been a resurgence in participation in the old parties and the people in general have become disillusioned with the change that ultimately did not happen in the 2019 revolution. They believe that nothing has been achieved and that in general Lebanon’s fate is always to be ruled by corruption and war… Graffiti in Beirut, 2019. Photo: Aftoleksi There are no serious collectives or major initiatives taking place because there is not much participation from the people, especially young people. Regarding the media and independent sources, there are not enough. I don’t know enough to speak with certainty, but for example Megaphone News and other indy-type of media seem to get funding from western countries so they also seem to serve someone’s interests to some extent. I am not aware of some serious source of information from the people for the people. There is a great lack of trust in Lebanon regarding media sources and this has held the country back in the area of organising. Tell us a few words about the particular structure of a society divided into different religious groups, how is it represented politically? What happens with the political system there, the parliament, the elections, etc. How does it work? Each religious part of the country is represented by one or more partisan factions. As signed in the Taef Treaty in 1990 to end the civil war, any party representing a religious group should have access to the government. That is, the parliament is split 50-50 between Christians and Muslims but each of the 12 religious groups has a seat in parliament. So, there is supposed to be mutual respect and inclusion in the politics of the country but in fact this is not the case. In fact, it’s dysfunctional because each major party represents a religious sect, and can veto—not formally but in the sense of withdrawing from political meetings—and then there can be no consensus. The politicians and the people would rather have a whole period (or year) go by without any progress (for example, not electing a president for years) than have decisions made that might upset the balance between the various partisan-religious groups. There is always the fear that such an upheaval could lead to a new civil war… In 2022, general elections were held in Lebanon. The abstention rate reached 50%. People said in 2019-’20 that they would get revenge from the parties, but in the end the 50% of those who voted elected the very same parties. Hezbollah only got 19.89% of that 50%. That’s about 350,000 people while the country have a population of over 5 million. I believe, however, that more people support them informally than what is shown in the election results as Hezbollah provides some services, food security, etc. to the Shia population. On the other hand, there are many reasons why one might be opposed to Hezbollah, such as because they do import a very specific foreign policy to Lebanon (alliance with Iran’s “Axis of resistance”). Or someone else for religious reasons if they are Sunni or Christian and see Hezbollah’s influence as a threat to their life, or someone else may be against Hezbollah simply for reasons of power, so that they can be in their place and have their privileges. There are also the serious people—who are fewer in number—who have serious anti-fundamentalist reasons for being against it, and who are therefore against all political factions because they are against this system in general. What is the situation with public infrastructure in the country? How is daily life organised in each region based on local religious authority? The situation with public infrastructure is horrible. It hasn’t been well maintained for decades. It hasn’t been given the necessary upgrades to serve the people and their needs. At the same time, the population is increasing (at some point to dangerous level with the displacement of so many people from the South by the Israeli attacks), while the conditions of climate change are exercising further pressure in regards to the consumption of water and electricity. To make things worse, the country’s electricity and water have been privatised by private providers who sell these services profitably. Basic necessities cost several times more than the normal cost and constitute a huge share of the people’s livelihood. Many homes have electricity for a few hours a day and the water supply is not constant. Anyone who can afford it gets electricity from private generators installed in each neighbourhood by businessmen (each one of whom is linked to the respective political-religious party of the area)! Everyday life and problems, whether you live in a Christian or a Muslim community, are common to everyone. There are no serious differences. The essential difference is with the rich. In the places where the rich and powerful live, there are much better amenities and security. In contrast, the common man struggles to secure a wage (which often is not even enough to cover basic needs) and be able to live. Each political party has religious power behind it, so the haves have divided the country between themselves, and each one exercises control over their respective region of influence. Similarly, service providers do not operate in other areas that do not correspond to their own religious or party identity. As we were saying in 2019, ALL of them are corrupt and oppressive and must go The post “People are disillusioned, they believe Lebanon’s fate is corruption and war” appeared first on Freedom News.

“STEEPED IN HISTORY AND STRUGGLES, THIS NEIGHBOURHOOD BELONGS TO ITS INHABITANTS AND OCCUPANTS”, SAY FOUNDERS EVA AND NICOLAS ~ Patrick Schindler, Le Monde Libertaire ~ Opening a new activist space in Exarcheia has a significant dimension. This historic district of resistance to the dictatorship, and today to gentrification, is particularly threatened by the Greek government and developers. Squats evicted and migrants controlled, permanent presence of police forces and muscular surveillance. It is against the current of the urban transformations underway in the centre of Athens that Eva and Nicolas decided to launch a new solidarity and activist initiative in this district, and have just opened a café-library, a meeting place open to people that the government wants to chase away from there: La Zone, at rue Soultani 17 in Athens. But let’s start with my meeting with Nicholas, thanks to two activists from the Nevers Anarchist Federation who came to Greece with a solidarity convoy. Drawing a portrait of Nicolas Richen is quite simple because it is made easier by the foreword of his book The Buds of Hope of a Terrible Greek Winter. He explains to us how when he was a student in Quebec, the Maple Spring in 2012 (the largest student movement in Quebec history) made him aware of “our collective strength”, the basis of his political commitment. This ultimately led him to Greece in 2016 “to learn, observe and participate in self-managed collectives”. It was in Ioannina (Epirus) that he met his accomplice, the photographer Antonia Gouma, and they decided to take portraits of some “victims of the austerity measures decreed in the early 2010s by European banks and the Troika “. A sulphurous context, aggravated by the rise of xenophobia, fascism and the extreme right in reaction to the influx of refugees in Greece. A series of photos, “The cry of the street“, introduces this series of live testimonies. One is one dedicated to Anastasia, a 56-year-old divorced woman, a former art teacher “with a broken life”. Then come those of young people who are part of the “exodus generation”, 4% of Greeks, many of whom emigrated between 2008 and 2016. So why did many of them—often students doing low-paid jobs to survive—decide to stay, to continue fighting and not to lose hope? This is what Sofia, the convinced, frank and passionate anarchist, or Fotini, a shy and anxious young girl, in solidarity with the refugees, will explain to us. Or Zografia, curious about the world but, unlike the others, still trusting the electoral process and the parties’ demonstrations. Between two series of photos, Nicolas tells us about his participation in the march of November 17, 2016, in memory of the student uprising against the dictatorship in 1973. An edifying insight into the presence and repression of the police in Athens. Then come the testimonies of Nikos, Manos, son of a worker, Ilirida, originally from Albania, or Rania, who joined after the police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in 2008. All trying to finish their studies, forced into small makeshift jobs and often living with their family. But with what prospects for them? Escape the deadly circle of capitalism, reclaim language, build a new collective imagination? From the struggle can be born many popular initiatives, free without conditions and self-managed: from social kitchens to residential squats to health clinics. Finally, Nicolas takes stock of these testimonies “as so many echoes of a hope beyond generations and borders “. We can also discover a more intimate Nicolas Richen in Des nuits et des étoiles, feu et vagabondage dans la ville , his collection of poems dating from 2022, dedicated to all alley cats with the stated objective of “sharing certain fragments of emotions and aspirations”. The political commitment of Eva Betavatzi, the second person behind the La Zone space, dates back to 2015, when she joined the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts in Brussels, and then worked there from 2018 to 2021. The ‘Greek crisis’ was already well established. Her meeting with Mamadou Bah, a Guinean activist who had been attacked by Golden Dawn and had taken refuge in Belgium, was decisive and forged Eva’s conviction that the fight against illegitimate debt was an integral part of the anti-colonial and anti-fascist struggle. At that time, the last Nazi leader of Golden Dawn, a member of the European Parliament, also moved freely in Brussels with complete impunity. Eva then campaigned in Belgium in anti-eviction groups and for the cancellation of rents during the first lockdown and then for the reduction of rents in Brussels. These experiences led her to Athens in 2021, but above all made her think a lot about her first job as an architect. Today, she practices it voluntarily in the service of causes other than commercial ones, such as renovating in 2022, with Nicolas and other comrades, the ground floor of one of the oldest Athenian squats. Is opening a new place of exchange in Exarcheia, in the form of a café-library, an act of resistance to gentrification for you? Yes, but we would first like to point out that the Athenian anarchist movement is seriously lacking space. One could say that it is “too cramped” within the city walls. In addition, in recent years we have witnessed a deprivation of spaces since the election of Mitsotakis and the strengthening of gentrification. Many squats have been evicted since 2018-2019 and quite a few activist groups are struggling to find new buildings and even to rent premises with the skyrocketing prices of rent and electricity. From a more sociological perspective, the struggle and survival of squats in Athens necessarily raises the question of the multiplication of meeting spaces and conviviality, not only in Exarcheia, but everywhere in the city, in order to effectively combat the spread of all-out commercialisation. Opening such a place from scratch must represent a huge financial challenge, not to mention the paperwork? Yes, for La Zone , it is a bit of a “Do it yourself” challenge, because we initially only had a very small investment budget. But in DIY , we must include the real solidarity movement that was spontaneously established from the start of the work. Thanks to the support of many comrades and friends, we acquired skills in painting, carpentry, plumbing, electricity, etc. We were able to count on the help of the resourceful people used to squats, on our friendly relations, on getting by, on spontaneous support, especially from other cafés in the neighbourhood. For transporting materials and recycling: our arms, supermarket trolleys and a car from Brussels! We also had to learn how to use a coffee machine, do accounting and orders… other things that may seem like trinkets, but are nevertheless crucial. For the administrative side, yes, we can talk about a Kafkaesque journey, particularly in Greece. Getting directions to the right procedure, the right office, and especially the right tips so as not to get lost indefinitely in the bureaucratic labyrinth, etc. Small and big hassles requiring a lot of energy. What does your stock include today in terms of books and magazines? For the moment, we have benefited from many donations, particularly from the anarchist and radical left in countries such as Belgium, France, Serbia, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, etc. But also spontaneous deposits from individuals, publications from local collectives, the press, literature, posters and even recipe books! Why did you choose the name La Zone ? The story began when we were looking for premises in the Kypseli district further west of the city where there is a street called “Sainte Zone”, hence the play on words. But for us, La Zone is also a snub to the spaces for the bourgeoisie. But we can also see it as “joyous mess” or even a reference to Zone à Défendre (ZAD) or a Zone without borders! We chose a French word because we wanted to be a place of primarily Greek and French-speaking expression (and at most multilingual in the longer term). Finally, La Zone fits well with the idea of DIY and the warm aspect of a lounge to hang out without having to consume. How did the inauguration go on September 7? There was a lot of joy and it was to our great surprise that we managed to bring together around 80 participants. It was, it must be said, a great sport. We had to improvise as bar tenders and animators. People had brought their favourite poems to read. It was very positive, we received gifts, people we didn’t know bought books, lots of exchanges and common desires, projects for rebetiko evenings or film screenings, poetry evenings or writing workshops, translation and collective learning… Athens is a very large city, for you, is the atomisation of the places of struggle a handicap or on the contrary an opportunity? And what do you think of the Greek anarchist movement? The atomisation of the anarchist movement can be seen in a positive way as an escape from centralisation. Given what happened in Exarcheia in recent years, it is not necessarily a bad thing. When you think that today some “tour operators” allow themselves to visit the neighbourhood as if it were an “alternative” zoo, not to mention the voyeurism of misery! But as for the Athenian movement, not all anarchist groups have the same conception of anarchy, far from it. Here we see criticism from both sides of various groups. Some have a pyramidal organisation, for others it is less the case. There is also a problem here with the machismo still very anchored in our circles. The same goes for racism. This is the feeling shared with many queer or non-queer comrades and those fighting with refugees. But what should be noted is the real solidarity during the strong mobilisations, as was the case in 2022 when thousands of people, comrades, assemblies and anarchist, autonomous and even left-wing groups took to the streets of the centre against the metro construction site on the only square in the Exarcheia neighbourhood and against the permanent presence of the cops. This is the most recent period of massive mobilisations for the defence of the neighbourhood. The barricades were set up at least one evening a week and nights of clashes took place. Today, the anarchists gather a little less massively, the movement has lost space but also energy, and the repression is stronger than before, in particular because of the recent revision of the penal code which authorises the cops to do almost anything. Athens remains a place where there is a lot of resistance from below: something happens every day. But let’s never idealise radical spheres, neither in Greece nor in France for that matter. One last question, what are your dreams, your hopes? Eva: it would be that the people from the last squats in the neighbourhood mix with other groups and activists, because since gentrification, Exarcheia is no longer very welcoming for migrants, especially with the constant police presence. For this, the multiplication of meeting places and also self-managed living spaces is more than necessary. Nicolas: I don’t like the term hope anymore, because it often locks us into a wait-and-see attitude. I would be happy if our new space contributed to creating new relationships of solidarity and anti-authoritarianism to build immediate actions, relationships of mutual care, beyond all forms of borders. Living in such a metropolis and in an often dystopian reality, it is this everyday neighborhood solidarity and internationalist relationships that allow us not to go “crazy”. Whether in Athens or elsewhere in the world, queer, feminist, decolonial, anti-racist/anti-fascist and ecological struggles are intertwined. This is what gives collective strength and a subversive joy to move forward. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos: Nicolas Richen. Machine translation edited by Uri Gordon. The post Athens: La Zone, a new libertarian space in Exarcheia appeared first on Freedom News.

ONE OF UK’S LONGEST RUNNING SOCIAL CENTRES, THE COWLEY CLUB IS BRIGHTON IS STRUCTURED AS A MEMBERS-RUN CO-OPERATIVE ~ Interviewed by Zosia Brom ~ Can you tell us about who you are and how it all started and what are your activities? We are the Cowley Club, a social centre in Brighton, we’ve been around since 2003, so for quite some time. It all started of a need for a space that not only fosters anarchist principles of organising but also serves as a community hub for various activist movements. Over the years, we’ve transformed into a collective with a whole range of activities. We’ve got a vegan café that serves up delicious grub, an anarchist bookshop where you can find everything from theory to zines, and a foodbank for those in need. But that’s not all! We also offer a meeting space for different activist groups—think of it as a home base for grassroots organisations. Our library is stocked with radical literature, and we host cultural events that are open to all. It’s about creating an environment where people feel welcome and can engage in discussions and actions that matter to them. Honestly, we’re always looking for ways to expand our activities, so who knows what’s next on the agenda What are the core values that guide the Club, and how do you ensure that those values are reflected in daily activities? Quoting text on our window boards- “For a social system based on mutual aid and voluntary co-operation: against all forms of oppression. To establish a share in the general prosperity for all- the braking down of racial, religious, national, gender and sex barriers- to resist ecological destruction, and to fight for the life on one earth”. In simpler terms, we are guided by anarchist principles of grassroots organising and ” no gods, no managers” approach and we are trying as much as possible for all those values to be reflected in how we organise in day to day basis and to remain free of the influence from the political parties, even the “progressive” ones. Why do you think maintaining social centres such as Cowley is important? As the world around us becomes increasingly grim—thanks to the cost of living crisis, rampant gentrification, and the looming threat of ecological collapse—spaces like the Cowley Club become more crucial than ever. We provide an alternative to the oppressive structures that are being imposed on us, showcasing different ways to organise our lives. This isn’t just about having a place to hang out; it’s about creating a resource for the movement, a space for people to come together, socialise, and plan for change. In these turbulent times, social centres like ours play a vital role in fostering community resilience and solidarity. They remind us that we’re not alone in this fight and that we can work together to build a world that aligns with our values—one based on cooperation and mutual aid rather than competition and individualism. What role does the club play in fostering local activism, and how do you engage with other grassroots movements in Brighton and beyond? First and foremost, we’re all about providing accessible space for important projects and groups in the area. We’ve hosted a range of organisations, including the Solidarity Federation, Anarchist Black Cross, Brighton Antifascists, and Brighton Hunt Saboteurs. These groups use our space not just to meet, but also to fundraise and strategise. Some of the initiatives are long-term, while others pop up in response to immediate needs—they’re all equally important in the grand scheme of things. We also love organising book talks, discussions, film screenings, and prisoner support events. Each of these activities helps to cultivate a sense of community and encourage dialogue around pressing issues. Honestly, we’d love to do even more, but a lot of our energy is dedicated to ensuring that we can keep the doors open and the lights on. It’s a juggling act, but every event and gathering adds to the tapestry of local activism and reinforces the idea that we’re all in this together. What impact has the Cowley Club had on the Brighton community? Over the years, I’d say the Cowley Club has made quite a significant impact on the Brighton community. We’ve provided a space where people can connect, organise, and feel a sense of belonging. The visibility of our activities has helped to normalise discussions around anarchism and grassroots activism, making these concepts more accessible to the wider public. We’ve also served as a support network during crises, whether it’s through our foodbank or by hosting events that raise awareness about social issues. By offering a safe space for people to come together and learn, we’ve empowered many individuals to get involved in activism in their own communities. The relationships formed here often extend beyond our walls, creating lasting networks of solidarity. How do you see the role of social centres like the Cowley Club evolving in the future? As the world continues to spiral into various crises—social, ecological, and economic—the role of social centres like the Cowley Club will undoubtedly become even more vital. These spaces will be essential not just for providing resources, but for nurturing the next generation of activists and organisers. In the face of ongoing challenges, we’ll need to adapt and evolve, finding new ways to meet the needs of our community while remaining true to our anarchist principles. We envision Cowley as a place where creative solutions emerge, where people can experiment with new ideas and practices in organising. Whether it’s tackling the cost-of-living crisis or responding to ecological disasters, we want to be at the forefront of creating and sharing resources that empower others to act. What future projects or initiatives are in the pipeline for the Cowley Club? There are loads of plans and ideas swirling around, but we’re currently limited by the fact that our volunteers can only do so much. The reality is that we need to strike a balance between what we want to do and what we can actually achieve with our current resources. How is the Club funded, and what are the financial challenges of running such a space? We’ve got a mix of funding sources keeping the Cowley Club afloat. Primarily, we rely on the bar and various events we host, alongside support from a housing cooperative that has a flat in our building and donations from our supporters. But let’s be real: the financial challenges are ever-present. Everything keeps getting more expensive—interest rates, utilities, you name it! Our building is over a century old, and with that comes the constant need for repairs, big and small. On top of that, we’re dealing with some historic debts that we’re working to pay off. It cost over £3,000 a month to keep the place running, and it often feels like a constant struggle to secure this much money. We are all working together to find ways to fundraise and sustain our space. What role do volunteers play in the day-to-day operations of the Club? Volunteers are the heartbeat of the Cowley Club. The whole place runs on volunteer power—without them, we simply wouldn’t exist. They handle everything from serving in the café and managing events to keeping the bookshop stocked and the space clean. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation, and we truly value each and every volunteer that walks through our doors. The more volunteers we have, the more energy we can generate, and that opens up the opportunity for even more projects and activities. It’s about building a community of people who share a common vision and want to contribute to something greater than themselves. Plus, it’s a great way to meet like-minded folks and learn new skills along the way! If someone told you they were planning to open their own social centre, based on your experience of running Cowley, what advice would you give them? First off, I’d say: go for it! There’s a real need for more spaces like this, and every community can benefit from a social centre. But my advice would be to plan well. Do your research and talk to others who have experience running social centres—there’s a wealth of knowledge out there, and learning from others’ successes and mistakes can save you a lot of time and effort. Keep in mind that every area has its own unique vibe, and what works in one place might not translate directly to another. So, while it’s great to gather inspiration from other projects, stay flexible and adaptable to your own community’s needs. Lastly, don’t forget to have fun! Building a social centre is about creating a space that reflects your values and brings people together. Embrace the journey and the relationships you’ll build along the way. The post Cowley Club Interview: “Every community can benefit from a social centre” appeared first on Freedom News.