A SINGULAR AND GENEROUS THINKER OF ANARCHISM, HIS WORK TRACED LIVING LINES OF REVOLT AND CREATION ~ David Berry ~ Daniel Colson, anarchist theorist and labour historian, died on 9 January in Lyon. He was 82. Colson was an active member of the anarchist movement in Lyon from the early 1970s, a member of the collective that ran the city’s anarchist bookshop ‘La Gryffe’ from its creation in 1978, and a member of the editorial collective that has produced the anarchist review Réfractions since 1997. A professor of sociology at the University of Saint-Etienne, he published extensively on labour history, revolutionary syndicalism, anarchism and, latterly, philosophy. Colson first moved to Lyon, France’s second biggest city, in 1966, when he went to university there to study sociology, after two years studying philosophy at a seminary near Clermont-Ferrand. At the university he discovered revolutionary politics, and soon became active in the student movement, which was dominated in the late 1960s by Maoists, Trotskyists and other assorted ‘gauchistes’ (‘leftists’—originally a pejorative term used of the student revolutionaries of 1968 by the French Communist Party, referencing Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder). Through his friendship with the libertarian communist Michel Marsella, Colson also learned about anarchism, the Socialism or Barbarism group around Cornelius Castoriadis, Situationism, Luxemburgism, etc. Like so many of his contemporaries he was involved in the campaign against US imperialism and in particular the Vietnam war, and was the prime mover in the ‘Vietnam Committee’ in Lyon’s old town. The group produced a newsletter, Informations rassemblées à Lyon (IRL), and after the repression and collapse of the 1968 movement, the Vietnam Committee transformed itself into the ‘Comité de quartier du Vieux-Lyon’ (Old Lyon Neighbourhood Committee). When asked years later what the objectives of this committee had been, Colson replied: “Nothing less than creating the embryo of an insurrection at a local level.” Influenced by the automobile workers occupying the local Berliet factories, the group decided to occupy the local ‘Maison des jeunes’ (youth centre), which had been where the committee had met over the previous months. “We were very ambitious. We were seriously hoping, when the right conditions arose, to take over the local police station—including its armoury.” That plan never materialised, although the group did occupy the town hall briefly. Colson was inspired by 1968 and especially by his experience of “spontaneity in action and in organisation”, including widespread co-operation between students and workers. He was also inspired by the discovery of three important books: the four-volume history of the First International written by the Swiss anarchist James Guillaume; the Russian anarchist Voline’s The Unknown Revolution (originally published in French in 1947, but republished in the aftermath of 1968 in a series edited by Daniel Guérin and the anarchist artist Jean-Jacques Lebel); and Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Not that he understood Anti-Œdipus at all when he first tried to read it—he found it “pretty indigestible” in fact— and even ten years later when he tried again, it was only the first chapter that he really got to grips with: for Colson, that chapter successfully demolished the “enormous Marxist theoretical apparatus” that dominated the French left at that time, and made clear “not only the theoretical but also the emancipatory, ethical, philosophical and practical power of anarchism”. Colson was actively involved with a number of anarchist newspapers: the Cahiers de mai (the May Notebooks, which was launched in June 1968 and was the voice of the Action Committees which had sprung up across France), ICO (Informations et Correspondences Ouvrières, Workers’ News and Letters, focussed on autonomous workers’ struggles, outside of trade unions and parties), and IRL (Informations rassemblées à Lyon, literally News Gathered in Lyon, which published eye-witness accounts and documents on social struggles in the Lyon area not published by the mainstream press or the main left-wing papers). IRL, which Colson helped create, was interested in workers’ struggles, but also illegalism and other forms of resistance, and discussed a range of movements: anarchism, council communism, feminism, ecology, antimilitarism, sexual liberation, etc. In 1978, Colson was one of the original group of anarchist activists who set up the La Gryffe bookshop in Lyon, and the collective is still going strong. As well as selling the usual range of anticapitalist, antiauthoritarian material, La Gryffe also has a meeting room that regularly hosts debates, exhibitions, film showings, etc. When Colson published a book about the collective in 2020, he was careful not to give an idealised view of a successful anarchist collective at work, but to highlight also the long and sometimes difficult history that La Gryffe was built on, including some serious differences of opinion and conflicts within the collective, but conflicts which were worked through and resolved according to anarchist principles. Having returned to academia, Colson gained his doctorate in 1983 with a thesis—later published as a book—on anarcho-syndicalism and communism in the labour movement in Saint-Etienne, 1920-25. (If ever you’ve been confused about the difference between the terms ‘syndicalism’, ‘revolutionary syndicalism’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalism’, and how the once revolutionary syndicalist French labour movement came to be dominated by Communism, this is the book for you.) A second historical-sociological book followed in 1998 on the iron and steel industry—and its owners, the famous ‘iron barons’ or forgemasters—in Saint-Etienne from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War. Colson explained once in a talk he gave on ‘Proudhon and the contemporary relevance of anarchism’—the main thrust of which was to argue for the rehabilitation of Proudhon, who remained unpopular in anarchist circles—that he had discovered Proudhon at about the same time in the 1970s that he discovered “the left-wing Nietzscheanism” of Foucault and especially Deleuze. Deleuze, he argued, “developed an emancipatory thought which had a lot in common with Proudhon.” Indeed, moving away from his earlier sociological work, and after writing books on Proudhon and Malatesta, Colson became increasingly focussed on philosophy, and was especially interested in Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari (among others) and how their thinking related to anarchism. This led to a number of conference papers, journal articles and books on these subjects—in 2022, for instance, he published a book on ‘working-class anarchism and philosophy’. Unfortunately only one of his books has been translated (by Jesse Cohen) into English: the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism. From Proudhon to Deleuze—“a provocative exploration of hidden affinities and genealogies in anarchist thought”. Daniel Colson was an active member of the anarchist movement in Lyon from the early 1970s, a member of the collective that ran the city’s anarchist bookshop ‘La Gryffe’ from its creation in 1978, and a member of the editorial collective that has produced the anarchist review Réfractions since 1997. A professor of sociology at the University of Saint-Etienne, he published extensively on labour history, revolutionary syndicalism, anarchism and, latterly, philosophy. Colson first moved to Lyon, France’s second biggest city, in 1966, when he went to university there to study sociology, after two years studying philosophy at a seminary near Clermont-Ferrand. At the university he discovered revolutionary politics, and soon became active in the student movement, which was dominated in the late 1960s by Maoists, Trotskyists and other assorted ‘gauchistes’ (‘leftists’—originally a pejorative term used of the student revolutionaries of 1968 by the French Communist Party, referencing Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder). Through his friendship with the libertarian communist Michel Marsella, Colson also learned about anarchism, the Socialism or Barbarism group around Cornelius Castoriadis, Situationism, Luxemburgism, etc. Like so many of his contemporaries he was involved in the campaign against US imperialism and in particular the Vietnam war, and was the prime mover in the ‘Vietnam Committee’ in Lyon’s old town. The group produced a newsletter, Informations rassemblées à Lyon (IRL), and after the repression and collapse of the 1968 movement, the Vietnam Committee transformed itself into the ‘Comité de quartier du Vieux-Lyon’ (Old Lyon Neighbourhood Committee). When asked years later what the objectives of this committee had been, Colson replied: “Nothing less than creating the embryo of an insurrection at a local level.” Influenced by the automobile workers occupying the local Berliet factories, the group decided to occupy the local ‘Maison des jeunes’ (youth centre), which had been where the committee had met over the previous months. “We were very ambitious. We were seriously hoping, when the right conditions arose, to take over the local police station—including its armoury.” That plan never materialised, although the group did occupy the town hall briefly. Colson was inspired by 1968 and especially by his experience of “spontaneity in action and in organisation”, including widespread co-operation between students and workers. He was also inspired by the discovery of three important books: the four-volume history of the First International written by the Swiss anarchist James Guillaume; the Russian anarchist Voline’s The Unknown Revolution (originally published in French in 1947, but republished in the aftermath of 1968 in a series edited by Daniel Guérin and the anarchist artist Jean-Jacques Lebel); and Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Not that he understood Anti-Œdipus at all when he first tried to read it—he found it “pretty indigestible” in fact— and even ten years later when he tried again, it was only the first chapter that he really got to grips with: for Colson, that chapter successfully demolished the “enormous Marxist theoretical apparatus” that dominated the French left at that time, and made clear “not only the theoretical but also the emancipatory, ethical, philosophical and practical power of anarchism”. Colson was actively involved with a number of anarchist newspapers: the Cahiers de mai (the May Notebooks, which was launched in June 1968 and was the voice of the Action Committees which had sprung up across France), ICO (Informations et Correspondences Ouvrières, Workers’ News and Letters, focussed on autonomous workers’ struggles, outside of trade unions and parties), and IRL (Informations rassemblées à Lyon, literally News Gathered in Lyon, which published eye-witness accounts and documents on social struggles in the Lyon area not published by the mainstream press or the main left-wing papers). IRL, which Colson helped create, was interested in workers’ struggles, but also illegalism and other forms of resistance, and discussed a range of movements: anarchism, council communism, feminism, ecology, antimilitarism, sexual liberation, etc. In 1978, Colson was one of the original group of anarchist activists who set up the La Gryffe bookshop in Lyon, and the collective is still going strong. As well as selling the usual range of anticapitalist, anti-authoritarian material, La Gryffe also has a meeting room that regularly hosts debates, exhibitions, film showings, etc. When Colson published a book about the collective in 2020, he was careful not to give an idealised view of a successful anarchist collective at work, but to highlight also the long and sometimes difficult history that La Gryffe was built on, including some serious differences of opinion and conflicts within the collective, but conflicts which were worked through and resolved according to anarchist principles. Having returned to academia, Colson gained his doctorate in 1983 with a thesis—later published as a book—on anarcho-syndicalism and communism in the labour movement in Saint-Etienne, 1920-25. (If ever you’ve been confused about the difference between the terms ‘syndicalism’, ‘revolutionary syndicalism’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalism’, and how the once revolutionary syndicalist French labour movement came to be dominated by Communism, this is the book for you.) A second historical-sociological book followed in 1998 on the iron and steel industry—and its owners, the famous ‘iron barons’ or forge-masters—in Saint-Etienne from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War. Colson explained once in a talk he gave on ‘Proudhon and the contemporary relevance of anarchism’—the main thrust of which was to argue for the rehabilitation of Proudhon, who remained unpopular in anarchist circles—that he had discovered Proudhon at about the same time in the 1970s that he discovered “the left-wing Nietzscheanism” of Foucault and especially Deleuze. Deleuze, he argued, “developed an emancipatory thought which had a lot in common with Proudhon.” Indeed, moving away from his earlier sociological work, and after writing books on Proudhon and Malatesta, Colson became increasingly focussed on philosophy, and was especially interested in Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari (among others) and how their thinking related to anarchism. This led to a number of conference papers, journal articles and books on these subjects—in 2022, for instance, he published a book on ‘working-class anarchism and philosophy’. Unfortunately only one of his books has been translated (by Jesse Cohen) into English: the Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism. From Proudhon to Deleuze—“a provocative exploration of hidden affinities and genealogies in anarchist thought”. The post Daniel Colson (1943-2026) appeared first on Freedom News.

THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED BROCHURE ANARCHISTISCH RECHT EXPLORES ‘ANARCHIST LAW’ AS A COLLECTIVE TERM FOR FURTHERING CRITIQUES OF THE SOCIAL AND LEGAL ORDER ~ Thom Holterman ~ Anarchism can offer an excellent framework for fundamental legal criticism. Since anarchists critique capitalist society, which relies on oppressive laws to maintain its existence, the addition of legal perspectives can allow for decisive criticisms of the present social order. The two approaches do not exclude each other; instead, anarchists can advance legal criticism without compromise. This aligns with what is known as ‘positive anarchy’, a term borrowed from Proudhon. Fundamentally, it encompasses a view of society without oppressive power and refers to order, dynamism, and rationality, in addition to mutualism and federalism. Such views and ideas can also be found in Kropotkin and Bakunin. Here, I would like to emphasise Clara Meijer-Wichmann (1885-1922) in particular, as she was one of the first female jurists, challenging existing criminal law and the entire penitentiary system over a century ago. What I call ‘anarchist law’ here should be understood as a collective term with plural meanings. ‘Anarchist’ refers both ideologically to ‘anti-capitalist’ and sociologically/politically to ‘without coercion’. Referring to ‘law’ as anarchist law thus places the term into a forward-looking perspective towards a libertarian society. This future-oriented focus does not imply that it is new, or without a past. Forms of anarchist law have always existed, but have remained largely unknown. As is evident in my first contribution in the recently-published brochure Anarchistisch Recht, entitled ‘Law and Power in a Libertarian Perspective’, one of the sources of law is human co-operation. This is further elaborated in my second contribution, ‘George Gurvitch (1894-1965) and Social Law’, where his ideas of ‘social law’ and political pluralism are discussed. The third contribution, entitled ‘State, Law, and Legitimacy’, addresses the foundations of that ‘other’, libertarian society, by French libertarian activist, anarcho-syndicalist, and historian René Berthier. The fourth contribution comes from French libertarian jurist Anne-Sophie Chambost, a university lecturer in legal history specializing in Proudhon. She demonstrates that anarchist law already has a history. Her text is titled ‘Anarchist Thoughts on Law in the 19th and 20th Centuries’. In these first four contributions, anarchism and law are seen as converging. As already noted, this doesn’t preclude viewing the two phenomena in a divergent, mutually-opposed sense. Law that is used to maintain the existing capitalist society, which is precisely what anarchists are fighting against, is a main aspect of this opposition. The Armenian physician, activist anarchist, and author Alexander Atabekyan (1868-1933) makes clear to us that this has been the case for a long time. His contribution, the fifth, was sent to me in a German translation from Russian, published here under the title ‘Law and Supremacy’. The apparent divergence between anarchism and law can be put into practice or worked around in various ways. In the sixth contribution, I listed some of these anarchists’ ways: ‘Apart from the Law – On Illegalists, Direct Action, Take and Eat movement’. Finally, the seventh contribution is by French libertarian jurist and anarcho-syndicalist Pierre Bance, who once again comprehensively examines the ‘question of law in anarchy’ and encourages recognising ‘anarchist law’ as a key issue.   The post Anarchism and Law appeared first on Freedom News.

IN THE PERSONS OF THESE TWO REVOLUTIONARIES, TWO DISTINCT PROJECTS CLASHED WITHIN THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL ~ Carlos Taibo ~ There are more elements of commonality between Bakunin and Marx than might appear. It was hardly a coincidence that both sought the shelter of the International and that, despite their disagreements, they shared space within that organisation. Aside from this, it is evident that both Bakunin and Marx wished to protect the International from external attacks. The boundless, perhaps excessive, admiration that Bakunin felt at all times for Marx’s theoretical work can never be overstated. The desire to leave behind an order, that of capital, was present in the reflections and actions of these two revolutionaries. Despite what I have just suggested, two distinct projects clashed within the International. While Bakunin and Marx’s positions were honourable, the same cannot be said of their methods, and particularly Marx’s. Regarding the latter, Grawitz has pointed out that, “a prisoner of his abstract schemes and objectives, he will only appreciate in Bakunin’s theses the manifestation of a rival, an enemy of his doctrine, without grasping the richness and nuances of a thought opposed to his own.” It was, in any case, extremely difficult to reconcile two very disparate perspectives when it comes to discussions such as those concerning the functioning of the International, the consequences of centralisation, the horizon of self-management, the nature of the State institution, participation in parliaments, or the role of intellectuals and scholars. And to make matters even more difficult, there is no shortage of Bakunin’s texts that, while moderately contradictory, defend the need for leading vanguards. While the superiority of Marx’s theoretical work compared to Bakunin’s is undeniable, the weakness and inadequacy of many of his predictions about the future must be emphasised. After all, Marx was a 19th-century thinker, he paid the price of Enlightenment thought, and, at the very least, he exhibited two silences—I’m setting aside for now the consequences of his centralising policies, the Jacobin spasms he led, and his uncritical stance on technology—that seem vital to us today. The first of these silences concerned the ecological question. Marx seemed to operate on the assumption that material resources were inexhaustible, and only in the last years of his life did he pay any attention to the environmental damage being perpetrated, for example, in the Rhine basin. The second silence was on the women’s question. In Marx’s work, these women exist only in their dimension as exploited workers, without any hint of the miseries of patriarchal society. Although it would be absurd to conclude that Bakunin fully accomplished his duties in these two areas, he did benefit from some interesting precautions. This was certainly more true regarding women and their marginalisation than regarding ecology, the latter being an area in which, even so, he gained some advantage from his advocacy for decentralisation and his disdain, albeit relative, for large industrial complexes. I take it for granted, in any case, that today Marx would write Capital in very different terms. Molnár has drawn attention to the proposal to treat the organisational problems of the International as if they were those of the state, and in this regard has emphasised that, in Bakunin’s view, “the existence of the International is only possible on the condition that its General Council, like the national, regional, and local committees, exercises no power and does not constitute a government.” Molnár concludes that Bakunin wanted the International to be the model of a society without any kind of authority. Furthermore, in Bakunin’s view, the International was to be the foundation of the society of the future. For the Russian revolutionary, the federation of workers’ associations and resistance societies prepared and anticipated the social administration of tomorrow, and the International, purged of its authoritarian content, prefigured that movement. In this respect, Bakunin’s self-management and federalist approach was manifestly different from that defended by Marx, who was clearly an advocate of centralising and authoritarian structures. I feel a certain sympathy for a concept, that of border socialism, which has gained traction in recent years. It aims to portray the condition of people who seek dialogue and exchange between different traditions. Inspired by this concept, I have often wondered what would have happened in the International if, instead of a confrontation between a haughty intellectual averse to self-criticism—Marx—and an impulsive revolutionary who often failed to consider the consequences of his actions—Bakunin—two different figures had clashed. I think, on the one hand, of the Marx of his later years, that libertarian Marx who took an interest in the rural commune in Russia, who dispensed with many of the dogmatic elements of his theory of the development of societies, and who opened himself to the study of the most disparate horizons. And I think, on the other hand, of Kropotkin who, drawn to the spontaneous manifestations of self-management and solidarity in the most diverse places and times, decided to write Mutual Aid. Perhaps then the scenario would have been different, and this mutual revitalisation would have given us a valuable gift: a shrewd combination of the critique of Marxist political economy, so admired by Bakunin, and the proposal of generalised self-management. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The 2nd edition of Carlos Taibo’s Bakunin versus Marx was published in Spanish in the autumn of 2025. His book Retinking Anarchy is available in English from AK Press The post Bakunin versus Marx appeared first on Freedom News.

EVOLVING OUR RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CRISIS, MILITARISATION, AND DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ~ Salvo Vaccaro, Umanità Nova ~ Not possessing prophetic visions, it will be difficult to predict what forms anarchism will take in the 21st century, as this depends on the geographical, cultural, political, social, and temporal context. Undoubtedly, struggles for the expansion of spaces of freedom, equality in differences, and solidarity—individual and collective—(including and especially among strangers) will always constitute the axes around which the specifically appropriate forms and modes of conflict will revolve, depending on the context of anarchism, or rather anarchisms. I will briefly focus on three global scenarios, not alternatives, but rather intersecting yet not hierarchically descending, within which twenty-first-century anarchists will strive to identify the best forms of action. There is clearly a fourth, linked to gender issues, but other contributions will provide us with general and specific features and contextual objectives of struggle. Of course, these scenarios do not exclude or downplay the more common, more everyday, and perhaps more local spheres of struggle, whose importance is crucial to our rooting in the territories where we live. However, in my opinion, global scenarios will also “over-determine” local or traditional conflicts, changing their forms and modalities and imparting, in my view, significant twists. The first is climate change, which alters the planet’s living conditions, jeopardising the survival of its ecosystems, with the risk of demographic conflicts, migratory movements, and the violent exploitation of resources (fertile land, water), etc. The nomadism typical (and even original) of the human species cannot be stopped by state or “natural” borders, such will be the pressure of migration in search of better living conditions. If the pace of exploitation of humanity’s resources (land and water, first and foremost) is not reversed, increasingly bloody conflicts will erupt, considering that half the world’s population is of working age, and a quarter of them live in rural areas, where 80% of global poverty exists. This is without considering the informal, obscure, and invisible work that escapes ILO or World Bank statistics. In these conditions, which it would be unworthy to call “emergency”—so endemic and reiterated are they by the dynamics of power and inequality on a global scale—the approach to problems can only hinge on bottom-up self-organisation, to mitigate the destructive effects of current climate policies pursued by unscrupulous state and business elites. It is from this practice of solidarity and self-organisation that an anarchist ethos is forged: a training ground for creativity in horizontal problem-solving that will gradually extend to the complete reorganisation of social life according to libertarian practices and attitudes. It is therefore time for the livability of and on our planet to enter the political agenda of social anarchism with determination, since we cannot count on being among the elite who will migrate to the Moon or Mars following Elon Musk & Co. The second global scenario is the recourse to war as a challenge to global hegemony in the 21st century, with the risks of nuclear annihilation and mass extermination. Already at the close of the last millennium, many American scholars were questioning which would be the hegemonic power in the second half of the 21st century, seeing China and its allies (including Russia) as the most likely competitor against which to pursue policies of containment and aggressive counterbalancing. It’s not difficult to imagine the same in China, only that analyses and studies are not easily accessible, let alone legible. After all, history has never seen smooth and peaceful successions of global hegemony—quite the opposite. It is no coincidence, then, and not just today, that we are witnessing a growing militarisation of societies, which already directly results in the disintegration of hard-won “rights,” even without losing the pretence of (pseudo)democratic representation, with the reduction of constitutional states to electoral-parliamentary autocracies. Freedom of action, speech, expression, the ability to shape one’s life as one sees fit, and the ability to adopt non-conformist customs and traditions are all practices wrested with difficulty from previous generations and, in some cases, from the living. Whether they are constitutionalised or translated into legal norms is of little importance: positive law grants and takes away based on more or less strengthened parliamentary majorities. The path will make the difference. By militarisation, we must not and cannot merely evoke the visible presence of signs of armed power (army, police forces, armaments, war industries, etc.). We must address the internalisation of a warmongering and bellicose culture, which arms consciences from a very young age, pressuring them with violent models for solving everyday problems and overcoming the obstacles that life throws at us at every step. Cultural models in which violence is exalted because it is simulated—game over, and we begin again—life as a video game in which you kill and are killed, but then you rise again in a limitless and infinite fight. It is no coincidence that entertainment video games fuel and are in turn fueled by military simulations, by autonomous and automatic weaponry that transform war in its forms, anaesthetising its wounds and physical traumas and transferring them to a psychic sphere. This is at least for those who attack from a position of technological supremacy, not for those who suffer its effects, as every victim of war knows. We must not underestimate or minimise the hybrid militarisation that insinuates itself from cyberspace into our pockets via digital devices. These devices are not only the source of capitalist surveillance for commercial marketing purposes, but also, and above all, the control exerted by governments and private companies, which now possess an infinite amount of knowledge related to our tastes, our actions, our physical and virtual experiences, which are transformed into numerical data easily processed by algorithms, resulting in a unique mass profiling —and this may not sound contradictory—that is useful for predicting and even guiding our future behaviour. Which brings us to the third global scenario: the advent of digital technologies, and AI specifically, which is literally revolutionising the way of life in our societies, not only in the areas of living labour, which can be replaced by robots and various machines, nor only in the ways in which “political” opinions are channelled during elections. The split between the corporeal, “real” sphere and the “virtual” dimension, whose effects are just as real, intertwine, delineating the formation of a subjectivity very different from the one we have become accustomed to on the material terrain of social classes and the balance of power. In an era of extreme individualism, advocated and encouraged by the neoliberal policies of recent decades, the collective sphere has shattered to be “resurrected” in the relationship between the self and the screen of my digital device; Physical sociality has in some ways evaporated in favour of a virtual “sociality,” managed by proprietary platforms, within which a fiction of communication and dialogue is enacted with just as many other selves, each connected via their own screen. The fiction of having a following of followers, of having tons of friends: in effect, we are unknowingly immersed in a bubble, within which my opinions resonate, becoming convictions as soon as I see them confirmed by others who think exactly like me. The end of the pluralism of ideas, excluded from echo chambers, the end of the emergence of dissent, the end of dialectical confrontation between different people. And when these virtual expulsions resurface in the space-time of corporeal existence, being unaccustomed of relating to different others turns into gratuitous, senseless, unexpected violence, except as a “defensive” form of a psychology devoid of real sociality, precisely because it is imbued with “social” surrogates. Neoliberal individualism, further translocated into the digital universe, produces conformist individuals, diversified replicas of a machine matrix whose limits and technological advances we have likely become prostheses, experimentally testing. We think we are the ones using the devices, but perhaps it’s precisely the opposite. Outside of any community of reference, disoriented and tossed from one platform to another, what kind of subjectivity will ultimately consolidate? What community could give rise to the communism of goods and services? What critical and diverse subject could emerge in the increasingly pressing relationship between the human and the machine? The new ways in which we feel we are subjects of ourselves, aware and critical of reality, push us to deepen and diversify our analytical tools, to seize new opportunities for “social(i)” connections from which we can reconstitute a strong destituent community capable of imagining and therefore experimenting with collective utopias organized around the pivot of the absence of power. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation. Summary of a presentation at the Carrara Conference (11-12 October 2025) on occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Italian Anarchist Federation. The post 21st-century anarchism appeared first on Freedom News.

THE GREAT ANARCHIST HISTORIAN AND ACTIVIST LEFT US A MESSAGE FOR THESE DIRE TIMES ~ Natasha Walter ~ How do we keep hope and faith alive? People keep asking that question as we watch the climate slide into crisis, war crimes stream across our social media platforms, and authoritarian leaders take power. While our problems may feel newly pressing, a pamphlet published in 1969 was already discussing how easy it is in dark times to fall into a state of permanent protest — “the practice of many active anarchists who keep their beliefs intact and carry on as if they still hoped for success but who know—consciously or unconsciously—that they will never see it”. From this point of view, “there is no hope of changing society… What is important is not the future… but the present, the recognition of bitter reality and constant resistance to an ugly situation”. Still, the writer continues, “it is just as dogmatic to say that things will never change as to say that things are bound to change, and no one can tell when protest might become effective and the present might suddenly turn into the future”. And so, those who resist are “scouts in a struggle which we may not win and which may never end but which is still worth fighting”. These words come from About Anarchism, by my father, Nicolas Walter (1934-2000). This combination of cynicism about the present together with a continuing commitment to a better future is characteristic of his work. Today, on what would have been his 90th birthday, I feel the absence of his voice ever more keenly. At the recent undercover policing inquiry hearings I was amused to hear that Roger Pearce, the undercover police officer who spied on Freedom in the 1980s, gave this assessment of Nicholas Walter to his superiors: “a cautious, alert individual whose sardonic temperament is met with respect or intense dislike, but never indifference”. True enough, but he inspired a great deal of affection and love among those who knew him best. Pearce also shared his judgement of Nicolas’s key work: “This well-written pamphlet, produced by probably the most prominent of today’s intellectual anarchist genre, is of inestimable value to anyone seeking a survey of the anarchist scene which is both comprehensive and concise. It is cited time and again as the publication which guided the political and apolitical alike to espousal of anarchism”. Front page of The Sun, 10 July 1967 While an undercover policeman is hardly an objective reviewer of anarchist philosophy, that does seem a fair assessment. About Anarchism still bears re-reading, as does much of the rest of Nicolas’s output on anarchist history and ideas, which ran like a steel thread through Freedom – and related publications such as Anarchy, The Raven and Wildcat – all the way from 1959 to 2000. While so many of these articles and reviews were keyed into the historical legacy of anarchism, rather than its contemporary practice, his own ideas and writing now come into ever sharper focus. Whenever I go back to Nicolas’s work now I’m struck by how current, unfinished and probing it still seems. Although Nicolas had such unparalleled grasp of the history of anarchism, his work grew out of his activism as much as out of his research. Richard Taylor chose to end his recent book English Radicalism with an essay on Nicolas, whom he has described as “the most erudite and eloquent anarchist historian and analyst in post 1945 Britain. He was, moreover, a leading civil disobedience activist in the peace movement”. For Nicolas, there was no distinction between theory and practice. It was in the rise of the Committee of 100, the nuclear disarmament group dedicated to civil disobedience, that he found the chance to put the ideas that he had been exploring into practice in the early 1960s, and he seized that moment. This was the time when he came to the insight that he himself thought was central to his political philosophy, the idea that there can be no distinction between means and ends. He first explored this in a discussion of Gandhi’s philosophy in his 1962 pamphlet on civil disobedience, Nonviolent Resistance: Men Against War. “In the Indian dharma, as in the analogous Chinese tao, the way and the goal are one”, he wrote, and went on to state that this leads to “a healthy refusal to make any convenient distinction between ends and means”, as opposed to the views of western philosophers who “have tended to believe that if one takes care of the ends, the means will take care of themselves. This line of reasoning leads to Auschwitz and Hiroshima”. Nicolas returned frequently to the moral and political importance of remembering that the means and the ends are one. In one article published, unusually for him, in the Guardian (collected in David Goodway’s Damned Fools in Utopia), he laid it out with particular force. “Everyone says something should be done – we say do it yourself. The politicians say: If you want peace, prepare for war. We say: If you want peace, prepare for peace. They say the end justifies the means – we say means are ends”. The great force of this insight helped Nicolas and others to steer the political culture of the Committee of 100 and other groups that flowered at that time (such as the Spies for Peace and Solidarity) away from the hierarchies and discipline of the old Left and into the anarchist way of organising that attempts to build the non-hierarchical society we want, here and now. Committee of 100 sitdown in Whitehall, April 1961. Walter on far right, sitting down. In his 2023 book If We Burn, a study of recent resistance movements across the world, Vincent Bevins examines that key political insight and blames it for such movements’ inability to build conventional power structures. In doing so Bevins states that the idea that “means are ends’ was first enunciated by David Graeber in 2002. “In the 1960s, the New Left had insisted that means also mattered in addition to the ends. David Graeber… went even further. In a 2002 essay for New Left Review, he explained that … the means were the ends”. But Bevins and other observers of social movements need to look well further back for this idea — certainly 40 years earlier to Nicolas Walter, as well as to the anarchists and proto-anarchists who influenced him. As Nicholas said in 1962, when he saw to his irritation that people were putting forward anarchist ideas as totally new: “Are Winstanley, Rousseau, Godwin, Fourier, Owen, Proudhon, Bakunin, Morris, Kropotkin, Cole and all the rest really nothing more than names? Has the anarchist stream really been driven so far underground?” Too often our radical histories are ignored, our personal and political roots are pulled up, and it is hard to hear the roar of those underground rivers of dissent. When I hear protesters today stating that their prison sentences for protest are unprecedented, I remember that when my parents and their friends set up the Spies for Peace group in 1963, which broke into government nuclear bunkers to publish the secrets of the warfare state, they knew they were running the risk of much longer sentences than protesters risk today. In my recent book Before the Light Fades, in which I tell the story of my parents’ involvement in the Spies for Peace, I quote my mother Ruth Walter: “We knew we were risking twenty years imprisonment, and that was scary but we knew it was the right thing to do. I was quite prepared to do it”. The Spies for Peace got away with their illegal actions, but Nicolas went on to be arrested for protest throughout his life, and was imprisoned for heckling a politician in 1968. He did that in protest at the Vietnam War, and in hindsight no serious commentator would argue that the protesters had got it wrong and the warmongers had got it right. Just as few would argue that the British government was right to keep secret from the people the plans for surviving nuclear war in the 1960s. Anarchists are so often doing the work that needs to be done in order to challenge the free operation of authoritarian governments, and yet now just as then, their reward is mockery and imprisonment. Nicolas Walter in 1996, in his wheelchair (he was disabled by side effects of radiation for cancer) We cannot afford to keep losing the histories of our movements, when we so badly need them, not just to understand the past, but to help us consider the possibilities of the present. We need to understand that there were always other forks in the road, and that those paths may still be rediscovered now. Nicolas Walter’s understanding of the anarchist past was a key to his continued faith in the future. As he once stated with disarming confidence, “It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion”. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Natasha Walter is an author, journalist, and founder of Women for Refugee Women The post Still worth fighting: Nicolas Walter remembered appeared first on Freedom News.