A PRINCIPLED ANARCHIST WHO FACED DEATH WITH BRAVERY, FUMIKO KANEKO IS A MODEL OF UNWAVERING DEFIANCE IN THE FACE OF OVERWHELMING ODDS ~ Jay Arachnid ~ Fumiko Kaneko is not a well-known figure in Japanese history, primarily due to her adherence to anarchism; she is also not a well-known figure in anarchist history, primarily due to her adherence to the more nihilist tendency. Prison Memoirs is her incomplete autobiography, requested by the presiding judge at her trial for treason; he wanted to know what led to her thoroughgoing rejection, not just of the judicial process, but of the entire Emperor System. The result is a memoir of her formative years, starting out as a non-person in the bureaucracy of the Meiji Period—her parents were not married at the time she was born, and she was not officially registered as the daughter of her aunt (then living in recently occupied Korea) until she was nine years old. The physical and emotional abuse by her aunt and grandparents was accompanied by an enforced penury that could be described as Dickensian. The oppression she felt as a child was reinforced both inside and outside her home by her family’s mistreatment of Koreans they encountered, as well the Japanese occupiers’ mistreatment of Korean people more generally. I say her autobiography is incomplete because it’s only in the final thirty pages or so that the exciting part starts, when, after a brief stint as a devotee of The Salvation Army, she gets involved with Korean anarchists in Tokyo. But the preceding two hundred-plus pages are a fascinating narrative of class differences, poverty and middle-class pretension, the rigidly hierarchical Emperor System, and how it all intertwines to crush the yearnings and desires of a clearly intelligent child and young woman. She writes: “But all the while I was leading this aimless, listless life, I never abandoned my true goals and hopes. What were these? To read all kinds of books, to acquire all kinds of knowledge, and to live life to the absolute fullest.” Fumiko, however, is not crushed, merely bruised. Her experiences of poverty and hierarchical oppression (as a female child, as a bastard, as a comrade of Koreans) clearly primed her for an attraction to anarchist ideas. She says, “Socialism did not have anything particularly new to teach me; however, it provided me with the theory to verify what I already knew emotionally from my own past… the feeling, almost as for a comrade, toward the poor dog my grandparents kept; and the boundless sympathy I felt for all the oppressed, maltreated, exploited Koreans I have not written about here but whom I saw while at my grandmother’s – all were expressions of this. Socialist ideology merely provided the flame that ignited this antagonism and this sympathy, long smoldering in my heart.” A classic anarchist coming of age story, similar to so many others (cf, Paul Goodman, Emma Goldman, and others). Once she found her place among other like-minded individuals, she was able to read everything she could get her hands on. She mentions the influences of Bergson, and Hegel, but the books that had the greatest influence on her “were those of the nihilists. It was at that time that I learned of people like Stirner, Artsybashev, and Nietzsche.” A true rogue’s gallery! Is it any wonder that she says later, “What is revolution, then, but the replacing of one power with another?” The memoirs end with the beginnings of her relationship with the Korean anarchist-nihilist Pak Yeol, with whom she was brought to trial. Unfortunately, for readers interested in the specifics of Fumiko’s political leanings, or the Japanese anarchist movement of the 1920s more generally, there’s nothing in her memoir about the trial, the absurdity of the charges, or the anti-Korean pogroms that had taken place in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Fumiko and Pak had been arrested along with hundreds of other Korean and Japanese radicals in the wake of the powerful tremblor. Naturally they were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. The so-called mercy of the Emperor led to their sentence being commuted to life imprisonment. Her defiance during the court proceedings—nicely recreated in the film Anarchist From Colony—calls to mind other famous anarchists who defied judges, like Louise Michel (“I have finished; if you are not cowards, kill me.”) and Louis Lingg (“I despise your force-propped authority. Hang me for it!”). This rejection and contempt continued when she received the letter of commutation: she ripped it to shreds in front of her warders. Fumiko Kaneko was found dead in her cell in 1926. She had written a nearly 700-page manuscript, but left no suicide note. And there was no autopsy. The introduction to the English translation, written by Mikiso Hane, states categorically that she hanged herself from a rope she made in the prison workshop, but that seems like a convenient tale told by a historian nominated to the National Council on the Humanities by the first President Bush. Regardless of the truth, the fact remains that Fumiko Kaneko was an example of a principled anarchist who faced death with bravery and deep contempt for the state and all its institutions. Her story, both the Prison Memoirs and the larger context of early 20th century Asian anarchism, deserves to be more widely known among contemporary anarchists. Not as a footnote of defeat, but as a model of unwavering defiance in the face of overwhelming odds. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman, by Fumiko Kaneko. Detritus Books, 2025 The post Book review: Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman appeared first on Freedom News.

THE CHICAGO SURREALIST FRANKLIN ROSEMONT TAPPED THE SUBVERSIVE ENERGY OF POPULAR CULTURE ~ Ryan Bunnell ~ Since its inception, Surrealism has been attractive to anarchists. Its methods and principles speak to us. In surrealism, many anarchists recognise our own hatred of boredom, disdain for the tyranny of positivist rationalism, and our desire to merge art and everyday life, work and play, reason and madness, our dreams with reality. Though surrealism was never an explicitly anarchist movement – a fact made obvious by the alliances of some of its leaders, albeit short-lived and contentious, with various authoritarian communist organisations – its spirit of radical imagination has made it a natural ally. It’s no surprise, then, that the Chicago Surrealist Group, founded in 1966, was born from the efforts of anarchists active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka the Wobblies). The group’s co-founder, Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009), in what seems to be a challenge he oriented his life around, took André Breton at his word regarding the relationship between art and liberation. In this collection, he engages heavily in the surrealist tradition of self-electing predecessors and fellow travellers – unwitting surrealists throughout history as well as in his own time. Rosemont is impressively well read, and he gives the surrealist treatment, in ways I found engaging and fascinating, to an incredibly broad range of works. For Rosemont, the primary locus of art’s liberatory potential was not to be discovered in the vaunted literary canon, some bourgeois museum, or university lecture hall, but in comic strips, dime-store novels, record stores, television shows, and the silver screen. In other words: popular art – which for him meant proletarian art. When Rosemont talks about popular art, he very much does not mean Pop Art, which he calls a misunderstanding and mistranslation of surrealist ideas. From the introduction: “Pop, as well as these other art trends subscribed to a reactionary ‘High Culture’ elitism, as opposed to surrealism’s durational homage to popular culture against the grain of dominant culture itself”. It’s this willingness to distinguish between popular culture and dominant culture that sustains Rosemont’s belief in the subversive and revolutionary potential of not just overtly radical art like Wobbly cartoons, but of mainstream, mass-produced consumer media like television, music, and Hollywood movies. This enthusiastic optimism is what I found most charming and compelling about his work. Rosemont’s synthesis of Old Left and New Left ideas gave him a means of engaging with mass media in a way far less bleak than his contemporaries in the Situationist International. The Chicago group collaborated with the Situationist International on publishing projects, and Rosemont was well aware of, and interested in, their notions of détournement (the appropriation and repurposing of images from dominant culture turned against it). But the SI’s inverse notion of récupération (the idea that once something is incorporated into the Spectacle, it becomes complicit in its nefarious project of commodification, fetishisation, and the reification of power structures, or at least becomes neutralized and rendered inert) was clearly not a view Rosemont shared. In fact, it appears he believed this process could actually work against the interests of the dominant power structure. In the introduction, Abigail Susik says that for Rosemont the premise of détournement, the “rerouting of mass culture by everyday individuals”, implied the inevitability of “…the infiltration of mainstream culture by subversive currents”. In the essay A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired Wild-Eyed Fiend: The Image of the Anarchist in Popular Culture, Rosemont offers a fascinating illustration of this process. Through an exhaustive survey of the appearances of this stereotype in various media from the late 19th through the early/mid 20th century, he shows how it morphed from a reviled figure used as a foil to valorise the state, into a quasi-heroic one, employed by humorists to mock police and other authority figures—an embodiment of “humor in the service of revolution!” More so than this figure, however, Rosemont saw the greatest possible manifestation of humor in the service of revolution in none other than Bugs Bunny. And it is presumably through this same cultural mechanism of infiltration that a monkey wrench like Bugs Bunny found itself tossed into the gears of capital. Franklin Rosemont in Chicago, 2007. Photo: Thomas Good Rosemont declares that for him, a single Bugs Bunny comic book (The Magic Sneeze) will always be “worth more – in terms of freedom and human dignity – than all the novels of Proust, Sartre, Faulkner, Hemingway”. To understand the degree to which he valorises this outlaw trickster who is “categorically opposed to wage slavery in all its forms”, one must understand Rosemont’s conception of Bugs’ nemesis, Elmer Fudd. Fudd is the “perfect characterization of a specifically modern type: the petty bureaucrat, the authoritarian mediocrity, nephew or grandson of Pa Ubu. If the Ubus (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin) dominated the period between the two wars, for the last thirty years it has been the Fudds who have directed our misery”. (He even ridicules disgraced former surrealist-turned-fascist Salvador Dalí for having once been an anti-Fudd before becoming the worst kind of Fudd.) And as everyone familiar with the cartoons knows, Bugs’ favourite activities revolve around robbing and humiliating Fudd. Rosemont boldly claims: “The very appearance on the stage of history of a character such as Bugs Bunny is proof that someday the Fudds will be vanquished, that someday all the carrots of the world will be ours”. A cynical reader could dismiss such a claim as naïveté or rhetorical excess—and I’m often a cynical reader. How could some commercial artefact of mass culture, whose main purpose is getting kids to watch advertisements, be in service of anything but the status quo? However, if I allow for a version of my own personal history in which, long before I encountered Emma Goldman or Mikhail Bakunin, it was actually Bart Simpson who made me an anarchist, I can sympathise with and thoroughly enjoy this idea – even find it inspirational. For Rosemont, surrealism represented a means of rejecting the world as it was given: a world shaped by institutions in the service of capital, where life is reduced to production and consumption, and imagination is dominated by rationalism. Throughout the collection, he explores a diverse array of art in which he finds articulations of this same impulse: Gothic literature, IWW art, blues music, rock ‘n’ roll, 19th-century utopian sci-fi, even the writings of early Puritans in colonial America. In much of this work—where I might have seen something compelling, repellent, or simply entertaining—Rosemont saw subversive energy and revolutionary potential. Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture by Franklin Rosemont, edited by Paul Buhle and Abigail Susik. PM Press, 2025, 348pp. The post Book review: Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues appeared first on Freedom News.

THIS LUCID AND PASSIONATE DOCUMENTARY ABOUT PALESTINE ACTION IS WELL WORTH VIEWING BEFORE STARMER’S “SOCIAL DEMOCRATS” CENSOR IT ~ Rob Ray ~ I can certainly see why the makers of To Kill A War Machine are worried that proscription of the subject of their documentary, Palestine Action (PA), will turn into a ban for them too. The Rainbow Collective have produced one of the most explicitly pro-direct action features I’ve seen in years. Unapologetic in tone, the programme includes interviews with members and supporters, who talk about their motivations, strategies and the ways in which State repression has ramped up since the start of Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. PA hardly needs much of an introduction after a week of intense media focus. But in brief, over the last half-decade the non-violent group has carried out a campaign of sabotage against Israeli arms firm Elbit, which operates numerous sites across the UK and is well meshed with Britain’s corporate and political Establishments. Its tactics have been to target not just the property of Elbit itself – making it as expensive as possible to operate in Britain specifically – but to also go down the supply and financing chain, hitting the likes of Barclays for investing in the firm and Arconic for selling it monitor screens.  Produced in a kinetic, glitchy manner which will be familiar to anyone who has watched many activist film productions, To Kill A War Machine flicks between footage of PA activists smashing through windows and rooftops, interviews, slickly dystopian Elbit advertising bragging about its lethality and accuracy, and blurred but nevertheless horrifying footage of the child victims of such “precision.”  Included in the interviewees are several recognisable figures, in particular eloquent takes from Sukaina Rajwani, mother of Filton 18 prisoner Fatema, Shezana Hafiz of Cage International, and Palestine Action founder members Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard.  The analysis and insights provided are well-presented, lucid and passionate, with Rajwani’s deeply admirable fortitude speaking out in what must be extraordinarily stressful circumstances watching her daughter going through the hell of Kafkaesque persecution being particularly worthy of note.   A minor quibble I might have with interviewee Lowkey’s otherwise solid analysis is his focus on how they draw primarily from the Raytheon Nine and suggestion that their iteration is unique, whereas throughout, I was seeing influences from the animal rights movement of the 1990s and 2000s, which might be useful to draw out a bit. The campaign against Huntingdon Life Sciences has strong parallels to Palestine Action’s strategy, particularly “go down the chain, find the weak points”.  They’re also being dealt with in similar ways (with some crucial differences).  In the case of HLS, government repression was more subtle, but used the same playbook – identify, vilify, isolate and shock. Rather than use the wild overkill of anti-terror legislation, in the 2000s Establishment reaction took the form, initially, of information gathering and infiltration by the State, while the media portrayed animal rights activists in the most ghoulish of ways, with the aim of dividing a perceived “extreme” wing of the movement from the cover of broader support.  Legislation was then beefed up, with injunctions being used to physically push legal campaigning away from the gates of the research establishments. Punishments were increased to allow for exemplary sentencing – frighten people off by making it clear political crime in particular was unacceptable, in a way that non-political crime was not. Back in 2015 I interviewed an AR activist from the time about this for Black Flag (p.16-17), who explained: “People had been sent down before, but it became multiple forms of harassment. We’d do a local stall about animal rights and local cops would show up trying to shut us down. They’d stand in front of the stall, intimidating people away. They’d follow activists around, stalk them at demos, anything to isolate us. At government level they changed laws to facilitate crackdowns. Harassment legislation was extended to companies after we challenged the idea in court. In SOCA (section 146-7) they specifically included anti-animal rights rules by banning home demos. That was specifically to stop us from getting shareholders’ addresses and targeting the communities where they lived, which was extremely effective. All the cops who used these laws have moved on now, so they’ve fallen out of use, but these laws are still on the books.” It might seem odd that Starmer, who would be well acquainted with such strategies from his time as a pro-bono movement lawyer in the 2000s, doesn’t simply re-employ them before leaping to terror legislation. Until, of course, you remember that his priority is not to stop a movement, but to outflank his political critics while shoring up his international position. The disastrous effects of proscription on free speech and individual liberty are simple collateral damage in the cause of silencing far-right “two-tier” accusations and brown-nosing the US.   The documentary highlights this procession around 3/4 of the way in, noting the path from an early 2022 meeting between Priti Patel and Elbit (shading into a dodgy inclusion of a rep from the supposedly independent Crown Prosecution Service), through to Labour’s use of arrests for non-violent action under terror legislation and a ghosting of activists within the prison system so thorough that even their lawyers couldn’t reach them. A clear path of private complaint, Establishment mobilisation, and politically-charged escalation towards the moment of outright repression we find ourselves in. The hope in the face of proscription is it might finally break through to the general public that it’s all our rights that are at risk when a political party decides to arbitrarily apply the label of “terrorist” to strictly non-violent forms of dissent. Unlike the bleating of far-right types about university students telling them to get lost, proscription is full-on, indisputable State censorship in the raw.  To Kill A War Machine is a solidly made, inspiring film to watch, but even if it were absolute rubbish, it has already done the job it set out to do. I ended up watching it in a meeting room, on a borrowed projector, via a hastily-organised showing by people intent on getting it out before the proscription vote. Up and down the country this weekend, and again tonight, others are doing the same. It’s already out there, and a State ban would come too late to shut the barn door. Now it’s not just the story of Palestine Action, it’s the story of Palestine Action they don’t want you to see.  To Kill A War Machine is available now and can be streamed or downloaded from their website. The post Film Review: To Kill A War Machine appeared first on Freedom News.

MARIJAM DID’S SHARPLY-OBSERVED AND WELL RESEARCHED DIVE INTO THE POLITICS OF GAMING FILLS A MAJOR GAP IN HOW THE LEFT HAS APPROACHED THE SUBJECT ~ Rob Ray ~ A distinction often made by progressives in gaming is in the use of the term “gamer”. Many of us avoid applying it to ourselves, because much of the most visible discourse in gaming is outright embarrassing. Nobody with any sense wants to be associated with stories where women characters with face fuzz, or normal body shapes, spark bizarre ultra-misogynist freakouts from popular influencers (and not infrequently developers). Social progressives and the left make intermittent attempts to push more level-headed analysis, but it’s hard going. Anita Sarkeesian, offering a feminist position, became a byword for monsterings meted out to critical voices by hordes of furious chuds. Noted critic of games enshittification Jim Stephanie Sterling, after coming out as trans, lost a full quarter of their formerly million-strong YouTube channel’s viewership and has been lampooned incessantly. Mainstream sites have been targeted by the far-right on the grounds that their largely milquetoast business-friendly liberalism is an infiltration of The Woke Agenda. That scene has good reason to aggressively police the boundaries of gaming. As Marijam Did, a longtime friend to both Freedom and the Advisory Service For Squatters, notes in her new book, gaming is by far the largest cultural zone worldwide, outstripping the movies and books which occupy much of our collective critical headspace. Billions of people play on any given day. Capturing the zeitgeist around its most popular products can provide a pipeline for recruitment and a powerful entryway into much broader social influence. Did’s own aims are clear from early on when she writes: “My ambition here is nothing less than the recruitment of an army of game-changers for this vast and influential field … Nothing was inevitable about gaming becoming the current toxic, misogynist, imperial wasteland with few, albeit crucial, saving graces. In a few short decades, distinct actors made it that way”. Well said. As Utah Phillips might have put it, gaming’s not dying, it’s being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses. She is meticulous in her detective work, dividing the book into multiple “levels” that tackle increasingly advanced and lesser-addressed aspects of the industry. Level One’s overview of gaming’s early years leads swiftly into an analysis of its well-known demographic tendencies and the ways in which a stunted wannabe machismo built up everywhere, from the pseudoscience of William M Cannon to baleful sexism that ran rampant at Atari. Many of these processes will be tiresomely recognisable to anyone who’s worked in “modern” industries, and in gaming particularly stories continue to abound, most notably in recent years at Blizzard-Activision. Did’s analysis is not, however, simply about the darker side as she moves on to Level Two, covering the sometimes enormous communities which have built up around games like Eve Online, World of Warcraft and Elite Dangerous. While these are in no way spaces free of the same problems of exclusion and cant identified earlier in the book, she is careful to highlight the positive aspects of what online gaming offers to millions, including the forming of strong bonds and in-game mutual aid. This acknowledgement that gaming is not simply a parody but a reflection of life is core to her main thesis that gamers and those who entertain them are nascent political actors, capable of transforming their material conditions. That an analysis encouraging solidarity and indeed class consciousness is vital to untangling the knots the industry has tied itself in. Both Levels Three and Four, talking about the culture and economics of gaming, build on this with a deep-rooted and thoughtful analysis of the conditions that make up the modern industry, with giant firms hyper-exploiting their numbered franchises, bearing down on and burying the offerings of an indie scene that provides sometimes outstandingly thoughtful fare. Did’s work has been a success for publishers Verso for very good reasons. It’s timely, incisive and in many ways unique – while there are more left gaming commentators than there used to be, it’s still not even close to enjoying the interest levels of say, television or music. And it’s important to note how far she’s been ahead of the curve for a long while before getting to this point. Her first foray into the subject was around 2017 with a tech column, Left Left Up, that presaged many of the topics she covers in Everything To Play For. That run-in has given her clarity and depth applying a radical insider’s analysis. Her conclusions on the immense possibilities for change in gaming draw on a wide gamut of left campaign tools, from building union power to internationalist solidarity and co-operativism – and if you keep an eye out, she doesn’t skimp on the less hierarchical side of things with a particular shoutout to French anarcho-syndicalist workers’ co-op Motion Twin, makers of Dead Cells. As many reviewers have said before, it’s a must-read for anyone who spends much time pushing pixels. Marijam Did, Everything to Play For: How Videogames are Changing the World. Verso Books (Sept 2024), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1804293249. £16.99 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Freedom Journal. The post Book review: Everything To Play For appeared first on Freedom News.

YELINSKY’S SHADOWS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITY IS A MASTERFUL EXPLORATION OF HIS LIFETIME SUPPORTING POLITICAL PRISONERS ~ SoraLX ~ During the current crescendo of authoritarianism, and daily reports of students and activists branded “political enemies” being hustled into unmarked vans, it seems especially pertinent to consider the history and trajectory of a movement created for the very purpose of aiding such victims of state repression. Boris Yelensky’s Shadows in the Struggle for Equality: A History of the Anarchist Red Cross is his consideration of Russian revolutionary history, the origins and evolution of the ARC (later to become the Anarchist Black Cross), and his lifelong work aiding anarchist political prisoners. Boris Yelensky stands as one of the lesser-known figures in the history of anarchist struggle. Through the medium of his informal and immensely readable style, his retelling of his life and work encourages us to reconsider who is celebrated in revolutionary history. By his own account, Yelensky is not a theorist, but his story reveals a powerful and pragmatic organiser who devoted a lifetime’s worth of energy to the support of anarchist political prisoners. As Yelensky humbly asserts, “The work was not done for glory, but because we believed in mutual aid”. The primary text is flanked by a foreword written by editor Matthew Hart, a long-standing member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Anarchist Black Cross and archivist of the organisation’s history, as well as a set of appendices which include related primary sources and Hart’s own writing on the 1914 Lexington Avenue explosion and its relationship to the ARC. The 17 page-size black and white illustrations by artist N.O. Bonzo are a visual analogue to this reconsideration of canon. Each is portrait of an ARC/ABC member whose contributions may not be familiar to the reader, but are touched on as central to the movement’s history throughout the book. Bonzo’s graphic line drawings are a celebration and memorial of each comrade, their faces wreathed with floral Arts and Crafts-style garlands. Hart’s text provides a rigorous contextualisation of Yelensky’s narrative and a full accounting of the organisation, while the appendices breathe life into ARC’s history via the voices of its past members. Aside from neatly outlining the roots, rise, and complications of the ARC as an organisation, the book delivers what is nearly a parable of life lived in service to the cause. The complications of such work are well described throughout both Hart’s foreword and Yelensky’s own writing. The internal conflicts of the movement as it evolved from pre-1905 revolutionary Russia through and after the Second World War are on display. The narrative follows the course of the ARC throughout decades-long struggles to define itself, decisions about with whom to align, and how to best serve imprisoned comrades. The details and causes of the debate between those within the organisation who favoured aiding all self-described revolutionary political prisoners and those who felt that ARC relief should be directed singularly toward anarchists is well chronicled by both Yelensky and Hart. This question is still not easily resolved, and is addressed again and again throughout ARC’s history. As Yelensky writes, “It is only for lack of space which prevents me from quoting many other sources which would help to show how the foundation of a separate anarchist relief organisation was rendered necessary primarily by the inhumanely sectarian attitude of those social democrats who at the same time claimed to have an intention of bringing to an end the unjust society in which we were living then and which we unfortunately still live”. Yelensky’s text is scattered with primary sources, including letters from Alexander Berkman and Rudolph Rocker, which bring to life the particulars of the debate for modern readers. A letter from Berkman in response to his comrade Lillie Sarnoff is particularly charming and potentially relatable to the modern reader.  Berkman writes: “Concerning your remark that we cannot work with Left SR’s, I may tell you that we, at least I, could also not work together with many of the anarchists who are in the prisons of the Bolsheviki. Yet I am willing to help them, as prisoners”. Matthew Hart’s prologue is knowledgeable and thorough and gives extra contextualization of Yelensky’s writing, including decisions the Yelensky made to omit pieces of ARC history in his narrative. Given that Shadows numbers only 96 pages, however, I couldn’t help but feel that a 78-pages of Foreword and Introduction gave an impression that Yelensky’s own words were somehow insufficient. This is hardly the case, and any reader willing to delve into the history he relates so lucidly will be rewarded by his engaging text and its modern relevance. In all, Yelensky’s writing serves as masterful exploration of the labour of building and maintaining a revolutionary organisation; labour which has heretofore been underappreciated. The history provided makes clear the absolute necessity of the work of the Anarchist Red Cross—and the Anarchist Black Cross today—and delivers a template for readers seeking to understand how they might support anarchist prisoners. Shadows in The Struggle For Equality: The History of The Anarchist Red Cross, Boris Yelensky, edited by Matthew Hart, illustrations by N. O. Bonzo, 145 pages, PM Press, 2025. The post Book review: History of the Anarchist Red Cross appeared first on Freedom News.

Rather than rely on the instinctive anti-fascism of many radicals who might prefer not to discuss what fascism actually looks like today, and therefore what the fight against it should look like, the essays collected here outline what being against 21st century fascism — both as it exists inside and outside the State — can and should mean. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Three Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism Ed. Xtn Alexander and Matthew N Lyons (PM Press, 2024) ISBN: 9798887440415 416 pp -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The selections from eponymous website threewayfight.org are arranged chronologically rather than thematically, which is a fair enough editorial decision. But it was frustrating to have to wait for more than 50 pages until any concrete attempt to define contemporary fascism is presented. Significantly for the essays collected here, this came from a 2017 document, while the Marxist organisation whose former members contribute the bulk of the material (Sojourner Truth Organization, STO) was founded in 1969 and remained active through the 1980s. The shortcomings of movement theoreticians who fail to offer more than a few obvious authoritarian characteristics of what gets called “fascism” (with or without hyperbole) are scattered throughout some of the more thoughtful essays and transcribed interviews. In addition, there is an implicit understanding that the simplistic labeling as “fascist” of any and all opponents of communism and/or anarchism is unhelpful. The other simplistic position that’s rejected is the binary opposition of “the West” — the cartoonish stance of official anti-imperialism which embraces any resistance to Euro-American economic and political hegemony as revolutionary, even when those resistance movements are clearly reactionary. As the editors say in their introduction, “The project’s … supporters rejected the conventional liberal model that portrayed authoritarian extremists threatening a democratic center, but they also challenged the standard leftist binary that saw fascism and liberalism as arrayed together in defense of capitalism against the working-class left.” The existence of an insurgent, anti-law enforcement and sometimes anti-war reactionary fascist movement (or rather, movements) completely escapes the logic of liberal antifascism. Beginning from their experiences from STO and continuing with activities in Anti-Racist Action, many of the people who contribute to Three Way Fight clearly grew frustrated with the lack of an analytical perspective among American antifascists. And it paid off; reading through the selections was far more interesting and enjoyable than reading an endless catalog of self-congratulatory action reports. That said, there is an unfortunate corollary that comes along with striving for analytical and theoretical rigour: the tendency toward centralisation and hierarchy. As self-conscious Marxists, STO already took these organisational characteristics for granted, would never have considered them to be a problem, and many such assumptions are scattered throughout the collection. Sadly, self-described anarchists are not immune to this tendency, as can be seen with various uncritical mentions of Love and Rage (1990/91-98); Bring the Ruckus (1997-2002?); the Federation of Revolutionary Anarchist Collectives (FRAC, 2001-06) and the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC, 2000-08). Each of these cross-pollinated organisations suffered from the usual drifts toward hierarchy and conformism. One essay, from members of the IWW union’s Atlanta General Defense Committee exhibit this without any hint of irony: “A mass approach requires a higher level of coordination. If we’re serious about confronting fascism … then we’ll need to get serious about group cohesion, group discipline, and accountability …The movement that we need now has to move beyond … individual, unaccountable behavior.” Perhaps if I didn’t know the history of the above organisations, I might not find this quotation from the IWW to be troubling. But the history is known, and it features loss of members due to organisational inertia, attrition from simple burn out, interpersonal conflicts that leadership either deny or deem trivial, all the way to public (often acrimonious) resignations and splits. And judging from the rhetoric still being produced by the current crop of groups deriving — both ideologically and with some of the same people — from the aforementioned outfits, virtually no lessons have been learned from previous failures to create, let alone maintain, formal cadre-based membership mass organisations. Anarchists are not against organisation, but some ask more questions about it than others. My own experiences as part of both formal and informal organisations has made me sceptical, especially of anarchist organisations that aim for a mass base. Nevertheless, leaving aside the various challenges of how many of the contributors — Marxist and anarchist alike — have decided to organise themselves, Three Way Fight contains plenty to think about and discuss. As such, it’s a valuable addition to the ongoing struggle. ~ Jay Arachnid -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article first appeared in the Winter 2024/25 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal The post Book review: Three Way Fight appeared first on Freedom News.

BURLEY AND LORBER’S PROJECT IS BOTH HONOURABLE AND NECESSARY, BUT WHY DO THEY LET MARXIST ANTISEMITISM OFF THE HOOK? ~ Jay Arachnid ~ Poor timing or perfect timing? Re-centring American Jewish voices crying out against the weaponisation of Jewish trauma by extremist right-wing/quasi-fascist Israeli politicians while at the same time deflecting and minimising the homicidal oppression of Palestinians (and now Lebanese)? I ordered this book prior to the audacious October 7 Hamas attacks; the authors had to scramble to incorporate something about it in their introduction and toward the end of the text. Sadly, their attempt to acknowledge the shock in the Jewish diaspora (as well as inside Israel) falls a bit flat after the ensuing – and typically – hideously disproportionate response by the Israeli military in Gaza and paramilitary settlers in the occupied West Bank, facilitated by the easy flow of weapons from the USA. And now (as of this writing) in Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria (and perhaps Iran by the time this is published). Given the public outrage against Israeli massacres of non-combatants, the targeted assassinations of journalists, and the bombing of schools and hospitals, it feels uncomfortably self-centred to read a book about mostly non-deadly Jew-hatred. To their great credit, Burley and Lorber have provided a concise but still excellent history of antisemitism in the first 138 pages (chapters one through six). Also excellent are the ways they briefly interrogate others’ analyses of Jew-hatred as inadequate, obsolete, or in the case of chapter two (Neither Eternal, Nor Inevitable: New Perspectives on ‘The Oldest Hatred’), politically biased. Yet in chapter five (The Socialism of Fools: Antisemitism and Anti-Capitalism), they succumb to their own. Despite being known as anarchists for years, they have a soft analytical spot for some broad Left, even while taking various leftists to task for harbouring, maintaining, and sometimes promoting a vulgar populist-driven antisemitism. On pages 100-101, they write: > > “Unlike the Right, the early European Left tended less to look backward at > > restoring a nostalgic past, and more to look forward, to the building of a > > more equal society. But they, too, often propagated antisemitism in > > misguided attempts to ‘punch up’ at the root of capitalism, and the ‘Jewish > > question’ was a fiercely common debate among Leftists. In the mid-nineteenth > > century, influential anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin railed against ‘the > > whole Jewish world, which constitutes a single exploitative sect, a sort of > > bloodsucker people, a collective parasite, voracious… every popular > > revolution is accompanied by a massacre of Jews: a natural consequence’. > > Anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon went further, insisting that ‘the Jew is > > the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or > > exterminate it’”. The very name of the Lorber and Burley’s chapter cries out for an explanation of Marx and Marxist Jew-hatred. Yet despite correctly raking the old-guard anarchists over the coals — insinuating that anarchists (alone? especially?) are the ones to watch out for — the authors pointedly and inexplicably ignore (or is it censor?) the contributions of Marx and his many followers to this unfortunate discourse; they briefly mention Red Army pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War as well as the idiocies of the German Communist Party in the 1930s, who made the accusation that “Nazis help Jewish capital” (p 106). Also mentioned in passing are Stalinist anti-Jewish purges in the former Soviet Union “and satellite states like Czechoslovakia”, (p 107), accusing Jews of being Zionist agents (despite the Soviet Union being among the first governments to recognise the new state of Israel in 1948); here, “Zionists” was clearly a codeword for Jews, aka “rootless cosmopolitans”, generally accused of dual loyalty, and therefore politically unreliable. They rightly accuse contemporary leftists of minimising and/or ignoring antisemitism because “Jews are white and therefore oppressors” (and other similar nonsense), but never bother to question where these prejudices might come from. Since Burley and Lorber are (anarcho-)leftist organiser-activists, it’s taken for granted that there should be – indeed, must be if there isn’t already – a mass movement for social justice based on anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, and that this renewed mass movement (the incipient stages of which are allegedly seen in the Palestinian solidarity movement[s]) needs to take antisemitism seriously if it to succeed. They write, “It is through… building community and organizing a mass movement, that we can build safety through solidarity, and win a just world” (p 325). This is perhaps their primary reason for avoiding taking Marxism to task for being just as mired in anti-Jewish caricature-based prejudice as Bakunin and Proudhon; the risk of alienating people with a history of Marxist-dominated mass movements is just too great. But if radical social justice activists are allowed to challenge pro-Palestinians for their support of Hamas and Hezbollah (“despite those groups’ reactionary beliefs”, p 214 –I would call this kind of truncated and facile anti-imperialism the other socialism of fools), shouldn’t they equally be able to challenge a truncated anti-capitalism that includes the Jew-hatred in which Marx was mired, and which too many of his followers continue to perpetuate? Or is there no historical throughline within the socialism of fools? The topic of antisemitism requires a multilayered and nuanced analysis in order to defy the too-easy conflation of Jews and Israelis – or making diaspora Jews responsible for and representative of Israeli policies (not coincidentally the shared wet dream of zionists and antisemites). And in the wake of the latest round of seemingly endless and increasingly horrifying Israeli atrocities, the potential targeting of non-Israeli Jews for retaliatory violence is sadly real. Burley and Lorber’s project to counter the mundane racism of collective guilt/responsibility is both honourable and necessary, and they have provided anarchists and other radicals a critical entry-point into the discourse.     Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber. Melville House Publishing, 2024. 375 pages. The post Book Review: Safety Through Solidarity appeared first on Freedom News.

AN ABSOLUTE TRIUMPH OF PUNK SCHOLARSHIP AND ALTERNATIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY ~ Jim Donaghey ~ Reading through this richly detailed overview of punk zines from the late 1970s and the 1980s, you can feel the effort that Matt Worley has poured into this. I imagine him elbow deep in piles of fading black-and-white missives, delving into their innards to discover themes, connections and discordances. Mention is made of hundreds upon hundreds of zines – and, unlike many books about fanzines, Worley gets beyond the front cover pages to actually provide a sense of the messy complexity of a dozen years of countercultural media. Zerox Machine takes a chronological approach, zooming out at key moments to offer wider context, especially with regard to the print industry at large, then zooming in for a closely detailed look at particular zines that illustrate an essential point. Combined with an embrace of all variety of zines, and myriad associated punk sub-genres and political preferences, the approach is very effective – meticulously detailed without losing grasp of the broader sweep of (counter-)cultural transformations. In a refreshing distinction from other punk history books, Worley is explicit from the outset that the end point of this book actually presages a huge upswelling of punk zine production into the 1990s and beyond (chiefly driven by riot grrrl). Arguably, the hazily drawn finishing point makes sense in terms of evolving production technologies – the book charts the shift from reliance on professional offset printers to the office photocopy machine (and nods to all sorts of other idiosyncratic devices such as Gestetners), closing off before the advent of the home computer and the retrenchment of DIY production. The ending of the book feels a bit abrupt as a result, but, as Worley puts it, punk zine production is “a story that never ends” (p. 310), with each successive generation and iteration ‘sowing seeds’ for the next blossoming of DIY culture. Other punk historians should take note: the subject matter doesn’t stop just because one book does!  The geographical focus is on Britain (or, more accurately, the UK, with the inclusion of numerous zines from the north of Ireland). MaximumRockNRoll’s emergence in 1982 in the US gets a nod here and there, and the ‘rest of the world’ is present in the scene reports, interviews and reviews covering places like New Zealand, West Germany, Belgium, and, with recurring prominence, Yugoslavia. Within the confines of the UK though, the geographical spread is impressive – lists of zines from absolutely everywhere, from tiny villages to the big urban centres – and Worley celebrates the London-sceptic localism that pervades many of these regional zines. Worley’s close attention to detail is impressive. It’s long been a bugbear of his that Dick Hebdige misattributed the ‘here’s a chord, here’s another, now start a band’ memetic image to Sniffin’ Glue instead of Sideburns, and never bothered to correct it. In that vein, one teensy error worth correcting here is the mis-location of Just Books anarchist bookshop in Belfast, which has been repeated from Fearghus Roulston’s error-strewn book about punk in Northern Ireland. For the record, it was on Winetavern Street! Elsewhere, the veracity of Worley’s analyses is not in doubt. The huge quantity and variety of zines that Worley takes as source material is impressive, and he augments his reading by actually speaking with many of the zine producers themselves. The reflections of zinesters some 40 or 50 years later is really enriching. With all the expected shrugging off of youthful naïveté, most recollect their activities as urgent and essential and important. Worley’s research is respectful of that energy, while weaving a critical and alternative history from their pages. Anarchism is a recurring theme, as you might expect, making itself evident in scrawled circle-As, countless interviews with Crass and Poison Girls, as well as more thoroughgoing engagements with anarchist political philosophy. But Worley doesn’t shy away from the messiness of punk politics, which is well-evidenced in zine production. He notes those with links to the National Front and British Movement, avowedly ‘non-political’ zinesters, along with the avant-garde and outré artsy efforts. The book also takes in the emerging football zine culture and those associated with indie rock (back when ‘indie’ meant independent). Worley has never been one to attach a false coherence to punk politics, but he’s clear that punk zines are politically important, and that ultimately, “a fanzine’s politics remained best expressed through praxis” (p. 217). Praxis, by the way, means the interplay between theory and practice, where one informs the other without devolving into two separate activities. Zines, perhaps far more than song lyrics or poster graphics, have the capacity to express that ‘praxical’ politics. Do It Yourself initiative, creativity and networking all animate the life of punk zines. The fact of their publication is political in-and-of-itself, and this interweaves with the ‘theory’ splashed haphazardly across their pages. There is a lot to learn from reading this thoroughly researched tome. Worley’s immersion in the punk zine culture of this period stands as an excellent example of doing history from below – this should become the go-to book for anyone who wants to know. Matthew Worley (2024), Zerox Machine. Punk, post-punk and fanzines in Britain 1976-88, London: Reaktion Books, 360pp. The post Book review: Zerox Machine appeared first on Freedom News.

THIS WARTS-AND-ALL BIO OF NESTOR MAKHNO IS FOLKSY AND REFRESHING ~ bob ness ~ I’m an old-fashioned guy, a romantic, even. In my heart of hearts what I really, really want to do is to ride down capitalism with cavalry and lop off its head with our sabres. We tried that already, but it didn’t work. When something doesn’t work, we try something else. We’re still trying. Over the years, there has been a lot of talk among anarchists about why cavalry didn’t work against capitalism. Failure often illuminates more than success. The anarchists’ historic retreat across Ukraine in the summer of 1919 was a thing of grief and glory. Some things that happened there had effects that never went away. Consider tachankas. These highly mobile weapons transformed cavalry warfare. This played a dramatic role in the Russian Civil War. Their evolution forked. One fork evolved into the sound truck, which strikes fear in the hearts of riot cops. The other fork evolved into the technical, a (usually light) pickup truck with a heavy machine gun in the back. They cast Makhno’s shadow far and wide. There’s even a war named after them. They called it the “Toyota War”. Look it up. Many reliable sources trace the invention of this vital piece of improvised military hardware to Makhno himself. This alone is enough to cement his name in the annals of military history. Then there was his renowned tactical prowess. But he was more than an inventor who knew how to fight. What anarchists like best about him were his politics. They are legendary. We all know at least the legend of the Makhnovists. It’s anarchist canon. At least we think know it. Even less do we know what really happened. For decades it was a major effort to find a book about him or even a book he was mentioned in. What could be found ranged from slander to hagiography. What we really need is a warts-and-all bio that includes an account of the people around him. To that end I recommend No Harmless Power. Allison really did his homework. He devotes a long chapter to very brief bios of anarchists that even I had never heard of but who all had Makhno-era links to Ukraine. Some were born in Ukraine and grew into anarchists there. Others came from as far as Japan, like Ōsugi Sakae. There is lots of fascinating trivia in this story. One anarchist cavalry commander had had both feet amputated in WWI. A cavalryman with no feet! Sometimes his battalion dismounted and fought as dragoons. His men wheeled him into battle in a wheelbarrow. That’s a story you don’t hear every day, not in the works of ableist historians anyway. Then there’s the gossip. Makhno really did drink too much sometimes (it’s not what killed him though; that’s a lie). Ida Mett thought his partner Galina was a gold digger… stuff like that. Who slept with who last and who owes who money have plagued our praxis forever. Somehow, we manage to work around it. Allison explains Makhno’s predilection for drag as having grown out of his school drama program. At first glance it does seem out of character. He was a pretty butch guy. Some of his feats smack of classical machismo. But he wasn’t afraid to be thought of as a harmless old woman sitting on a tree stump, munching on sunflower seeds within earshot of some enemy brass who were discussing strategy. To them, (s)he was as invisible as the stump (s)he sat on. That’s how disguises are supposed to work. That’s also how patriarchy works. Patriarchy is a scourge upon humanity, but on occasion it can be turned against its practitioners. Makhno wore other disguises, too. Sometimes he would dress as an enemy soldier of one sort or another. He had many enemies, and they wore different uniforms, which made them easy to deceive. It was in a Cheka uniform that he escaped into exile. This had been the idea of his righthand man, Lev Zinkovsky, the head of the anarchist intelligence service. I would have liked this book more if Allison had devoted more time to this part in the struggle. After all, a war without spies never happens. Anywhere. Ever. Fortunately, we have “Kontrrazvedka: The Story of the Makhnovist Intelligence Service”, by V. Azarov to flesh out this part of our story. There could have been a chapter devoted to another fascinating character, Maria Nikiforova. She played a much bigger role in the story of the Makhnovshchina than Sakae, which is not to denigrate Sakae in any way. Sakae was a shining example of anarchists in action, but he managed to get deported before he could even meet Makhno. Nikiforova, on the other hand, fought in the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (on horseback with a sabre, and with a squadron of cavalry at her back and under her command). Fortunately, we have “Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc”, by Malcolm Archibald to fill us in. When Allison gets to the Platform, he goes deep into the machinations and personal interactions involved in the debate surrounding this document, but on the Platform itself he’s pretty neutral, at least in print. That’s wrong of him. The Platform was a colossal mistake; its adoption would have been an even bigger one. It needs to be condemned in no uncertain terms, and this needs repeating, even today. Emma Goldman herself spoke out against Platformism. Bolshevism without Bolsheviks?! Preposterous. They’d just become Bolsheviks, and we’d be back to square one. Besides, all states excel at decapitating frontal attacks. Only a decentralised movement is immune. It has no capit to decate. Why give it one? Despite these flaws, No Harmless Power is an excellent book. Its folksy style provides a refreshing counterpoint, for example, to Skirda’s more pedantic “Anarchy’s Cossack”, which is also an excellent book. Allison’s judicious use of snark and vernacular does much to make it accessible to modern sensibilities. It gives us moderns a look inside the anarchist movement as it used to be and to a certain extent still is today. It’s more about the people than it is about the ideology. Anarchism itself should be more about the people than the ideology. All anarchists would do well to read this book. We’d all do well to read all of anarchist history. Without history the wisdom of our ancestors eludes us. So does their folly. We need for that not to happen. So read history. Start today. No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno, by Charlie Allison; Illustrated by Kevin Matthews and N.O. Bonzo. PM Press, 2023. 256 pages The post Book review: No Harmless Power appeared first on Freedom News.