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.

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 The biography is based in part on testimonies from people close to him, such as his son Leo, and on previously unpublished documents.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

THE FILMMAKER’S SOCIAL REALISM WAS ALWAYS SUSPICIOUS OF ESTABLISHED POWER ~ Bleart Thaçi ~ Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr died on 6 January at the age of 70, after a long illness. His body of work stands among the most severe and distinctive in late twentieth century European cinema, ranging from the early social dramas Family Nest, The Outsider, The Prefab People, Almanac of Fall and Damnation to the later landmark films Sátántangó, Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse. Discussion of Tarr has often centred on style and form, on duration, repetition or bleakness, yet his films were shaped just as much by a political outlook formed early and articulated consistently throughout his life. Tarr described himself, without hesitation, as an anarchist. In interviews late in life, Tarr spoke openly about his political formation during his final years of high school. He said that he identified with the far left, recalling that he no longer carried a school-bag, since Mao’s Little Red Book in his pocket was enough. He described himself as a committed communist until around the age of sixteen. What followed was a break rather than a conversion. He came to believe that the leaders he had been taught to admire were false communists, concerned with authority and control rather than emancipation. From that point, he distanced himself from communism as it was practised and presented to him. This suspicion of established power remained a constant. Tarr did not move towards liberalism, nor did he align himself with nationalist opposition. His comments suggest a settled distrust of political systems that claim moral authority while reproducing hierarchy. In later public appearances, he spoke sharply about the historical record of communism, at one point remarking that he had never seen a good communist. His political views were shaped as much by circumstance as by ideology, and when plans to study philosophy fell through he went to work at the Óbuda shipyards. Living and working among industrial labourers informed what he later called his social cinema. His earliest films emerged from the Budapest School and the Béla Balázs Studio, an experimental and semi-underground environment that favoured small budgets, amateur equipment and non professional actors. These films focused on housing shortages, unstable employment, the pressure of economic conditions on personal relationships or the wear of poverty on everyday relations. Tarr spoke of being close to working class people and of wanting to record daily life as it was, rather than impose symbolic narratives. Frame from Satantango He often explained that his turn to filmmaking came from frustration with cinema itself. Films, he said, were full of false stories that bore little resemblance to lived experience. Making films became a way of showing conditions as they were, without embellishment or instruction. This approach extended to his working methods. He avoided professional polish, relied on non actors, and resisted narrative forms that dictated meaning from above. These choices reflected a broader opposition to authority rather than an attempt to promote a fixed political programme. As his career developed, Tarr became more outspoken about contemporary politics. He was an atheist and a consistent critic of nationalism. In a 2016 interview, he described Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen as national shames, framing his criticism in explicitly moral terms. His denunciation of nationalism was especially pointed in the Hungarian context (under the aforementioned prime minister), where he became an outspoken critic of the state’s handling of migration and asylum. During the European migration crisis, Tarr wrote a statement that was displayed near a pro-migration exhibition in front of the Hungarian Parliament. “We have brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe with our greediness and our unlimited ignorance… Now, we are confronted with the victims of our acts.” In it, he argued that Europe had helped bring about global catastrophe through greed, ignorance and wars waged for exploitation. He then asked what kind of morality was being defended when fences were built to keep out people displaced by those same actions. In his final years, Tarr continued to speak out publicly, even as his health declined. In December 2023, he was among a group of filmmakers who signed an open letter (alongside Pedro Costa, Aki Kaurismäki, Claire Denis, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Christian Petzold, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, etc.) calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the killing of civilians, the establishment of humanitarian corridors, and the release of Israeli hostages. To remember Béla Tarr is to remember a filmmaker for whom politics was neither decorative nor secondary. His anarchism was not a posture but an orientation that shaped how he lived, how he worked and how he spoke. It remains present in his films as a cinema that refuses obedience, legitimacy, or consolation in the face of power. The post Béla Tarr (1955-2026) appeared first on Freedom News.

> TRUMP’S LATEST INTERNATIONAL OBSCENITY HAS PLENTY OF PRECEDENTS, AS THIS 1990 > FREEDOM ARTICLE SHOWS ~ punkacademic ~ Yesterday the United States attacked Venezuela, bombing military and civilian installations and abducting President Nicolas Maduro and his wife under “narco-terrorism” and weapons charges. Donald Trump claims the US will now “run” the country until a friendly regime is installed, but it remains unclear how either is supposed to happen. American rhetoric around Maduro’s Venezuela has been been escalating throughout the first year of Trump’s second term. Accusing Venezuela of responsibility for fentanyl shipments to the US along with other drugs, rhetoric has also been accompanied by the murder of civilians aboard boats in the Caribbean by US forces, boats alleged by the US to be carrying drugs but whose crews have been butchered in flagrant defiance of ‘international law’. But as we see in this month’s Radical Reprint, this is hardly the first time the US has behaved in this fashion. Indeed, as our entry from January 1990 reprinted below note, this is characteristic of US policy from way before the advent of Donald Trump. In 1989, in ‘Operation Just Cause’, the US invaded Panama to topple the government of Manuel Noriega and render him into US custody. The differences – Noriega had been a US intelligence asset, and no-one seriously thinks Maduro was – are less important than the similarities. Both were leaders who in different ways stood in the way of US interests, Noriega belatedly and Maduro throughout his tenure. The distinctions in the Trump era are principally not of kind but of form, and of scope. To paraphrase one academic, we haven’t been “lied to well enough.” ‘America’ is still, as in 1990, perfectly happy to kill whoever it wants to get whatever it wants, but under Trump it makes less of an effort to present it in a fashion liberal hypocrites can swallow. In recent weeks, Trump has become more overt in his discussions of Venezuela’s oil reserves, which he claimed had been stolen from the US since the 1970s. And then we come to the scope. Trump has also said he wants to seize Greenland from Denmark and annex Canada. That is different, and it is that, rather than the fate of Venezuelans, which excites the sensibilities of liberals who for eighty years have been happy to be vassal subjects of an American empire which kills ‘over there’.   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------   YANKEE GO HOME! The Nicaraguan Government has expelled 20 US diplomats in reprisal for the raid on the Nicaraguan ambassador’s residence in Panama City, which President Bush described as a ‘screw-up’, during the United States military invasion of Panama, which it has named ‘Operation Just Cause’. This was just a mistake, but as the Nicaraguan government told the United Nations, over the last few years the United States government has made 46 incursions into Latin America and six into Panama itself. Bush was reported to want deposed dictator Noriega ‘dead or alive’, calling him a ‘gangster’ and a ‘common criminal’ (which he was) but distracting attention from the real issue which is that he was a crook when he was put in power by the US at the time when Bush was working for the CIA and was in charge of the war against drugs. Bush was CIA director when Noriega acted under contract as an intelligence agent, and now Noriega is claiming that he has the goods’ on Bush, including evidence about the Iran-Contra scandal. Panama is virtually a US dependency, being carved out of Colombia in 1903 for the construction of the Canal. What worried Bush was that he would not have a stable government (that is, one which can be relied on to support US interests) to which to hand over the Canal at the end of the century. (If he abrogated the Canal Treaty, America might have its own Suez). So, although it was popular unrest in Panama itself which finally made the US unseat Noriega, the invasion has involved an aerial bombardment with civilian casualties in the poor areas, 1400 people had their homes destroyed in the attack on Noriega’s headquarters; it is reported that more than 300 non-combatants have been killed and hundreds wounded in addition to the deaths of 21 United States servicemen and 59 Panamanian troops, but Noriega survives. It is reported of the new Panamanian President Guillermo Endora that ‘his top priority was to organise a new police force and new armed forces to assert his authority, restore order, and set the stage for a US withdrawal’, while a businessman in the duty-free zone is quoted as saying that ‘his wish was to carry out more business in the future unhindered by political considerations’. But our businessman presumably wants the government to protect his property and his right to make profits, while the new government has been installed with US backing to protect US interests. The United States action is typical of their policy of supporting any dictator whatever he does as long as he supports US actions overseas, and ousting him whenever his policies are no longer politically advantageous to the United States. The economies of Latin American countries are exploited to the advantage of the United States instead of their own populations. As for the drug problem, the United States government cannot even control its own Mafia, while the lot of the poor in the USA is not of interest to the government. The post Radical Reprint: America’s ‘Just Causes’ 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.

FOR SEVERAL SEASONS, THE CLUB HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF THE FIGHT FOR EQUAL PRIZE MONEY FOR MEN’S AND WOMEN’S COMPETITIONS ~ from Dialectik Football ~ The Football Association has frozen prize money for the 2025/26 Women’s FA Cup while increasing the total prize money for the men’s competition. This represents a setback for the small steps taken in recent seasons towards equal prize money. Why has the Football Association (FA) chosen to exacerbate the inequalities in its flagship competition? Lewes FC took advantage of the Women’s FA Cup third round to raise this issue again and request a meeting with the FA’s Professional Game Board (PGB) to get an explanation for this reversal. Ahead of their match against Crystal Palace at the Dripping Pan on 14 December, the East Sussex club called on its supporters to use the game as a platform to protest once more against the freeze on prize money for the Women’s Cup. Rooks fans symbolically displayed banners bearing the equals sign in the stands. “Equality is not a cost, it’s a commitment to the future of football,” proclaims the campaign slogan. This demand is not new for Lewes, who launched the “Equal FA Cup” campaign in 2019. Since then, while the FA has indeed doubled the prize money for women’s competitions, the gap with that of men remains enormous. THE FIGURES AND THE STARK REALITY To give an idea, the winning teams in the third round of the Women’s FA Cup received £35,000 in prize money, while the runners-up received only £9,000. Meanwhile, at the same stage of the competition, men’s teams will receive £121,500 for the winners and £26,500 for the eliminated team. The freeze on the overall prize money for the women’s FA Cup (144,000 pounds was added to cover a new preliminary round) is all the more unfair given that the men’s prize money has increased by 1.5 million pounds compared to the 2024/25 season. The freeze also applies to prize money paid during the preliminary rounds of the men’s FA Cup, impacting dozens of amateur clubs already burdened by the overall increase in costs. Adding insult to injury, the winner of the men’s edition will receive 2.12 million pounds next May, 120,000 pounds more than last season. Considering the revenues of the Premier League clubs to whom the trophy is promised, this increase feels like an insult to the teams in the earlier rounds who could have shared it. “Today, the lion’s share of the £23.5 million prize money for men’s football will go to wealthy Premier League clubs who arguably need it the least and for whom this money will make very little difference,” laments Ben Hall, director of Lewes FC, in an opinion piece published on the BBC website. “Same sport, same rules, same competition, same knockout format, same governing body, but a different value placed on the women’s and men’s players.” In the early rounds, the prize money is so paltry that many women’s teams lose money. The costs incurred by travel, medical coverage, and pitch rentals often exceed the prize money earned from a victory at this stage of the competition. INEQUALITY AT EVERY LEVEL Ironically, the FA knows how to be egalitarian when it comes to national teams, its crown jewels. Since 2020, the FA has been paying women the same match fees and bonuses as men. “The question, therefore, isn’t whether the FA believes in equality, but rather why this conviction stops at the FA Cup,” Hall continues. The governing bodies have no shortage of excuses, citing commercial realities and differences in television revenue. For Ben Hall, it’s primarily a matter of political choice: “The FA decides the prize money for both competitions. They could make them equal tomorrow; they simply would have to.” For many, this situation is merely the result of the setback women’s football has suffered due to its 50-year ban by the English Football Association, perpetuating a view of football primarily as a male preserve. Under the guise of profitability, the FA is simply perpetuating this history of male dominance. A CALL TO OTHER CLUBS This is why Lewes FC wrote to all the teams participating in the Women’s FA Cup, inviting them to carry out protest actions such as a team photo before kickoff, with the players forming an “=” sign with their arms, and a 21-second pause after kickoff, referencing 1921, the year the FA banned women’s football. Lewes FC and Corsham Town did this during the first round. With its “Equality FC” campaign launched in 2017, Lewes has already become the first club – in the English professional and semi-professional landscape – to allocate equal resources to its women’s and men’s teams. It has made this fight for equal treatment in football a central element of its DNA as a “community-based” club. While it is still struggling to bring many other clubs on board, the club is not giving up. However, it is not entirely alone. A few seasons ago, Clapton CFC and Stourbridge FC Ladies also took up the cause. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation The post Lewes FC, a club in pursuit of equality appeared first on Freedom News.

WE HAD SOME REALLY MEANINGFUL INTERACTIONS AT POINTS AND EVEN GAINED A MOURNER FOR ONE LEG OF THE JOURNEY ~ Jo Lane ~ ‘The Death of Humanity’ was a protest that didn’t look like a protest. Ahead of International Human Rights Day, a convoy of artists and activists carried a funeral wreath reading ‘HUMANITY’, stopping at key landmarks across London and Manchester, until the wreaths were laid down at their final resting places. Born from an acknowledgement that traditional protest does not ‘reach’ everyone, this was an opportunity for people to experience a different narrative, one whereby they don’t feel like they are being told what to think. The hope was it would provide people with an experience that left space for them to find their own emotional connection to the theme, creating opportunities for understanding different perspectives, and building bridges for potential change. In London, we had a couple of ‘mourners from afar’ at each action who would interact with the public. If people chose to interact and find out more they were met with compassionate, restorative conversations, and if they asked, we shared our motivations behind the piece. Manchester. Photo: Karol Wyszynski We had some really meaningful interactions at points and even gained a mourner for one leg of the journey. One man, although agreed with the concept, was uncomfortable with the ‘morbidity’ suggesting we need to bring hope to the world, rather than further misery and pain. Although I completely agree with this sentiment, and a lot of my work is hopeful in its nature, I also believe it is important to carve space for, and honour the feelings of helplessness that so many of us have felt recently. My favourite comment I overheard on Sunday was “Mummy what does that say” to which her Mum responded “I don’t know”. We will never know whether this was her not wanting to delve into this deep discussion with their daughter, or if she actually didn’t know what it said. Either way feels quite poignant for me. The Manchester action was bleak and miserable with regards to weather, which added its own surreal and poignant vibe, all of us kitted out with big black umbrellas like the opening scene of a Batman Movie. We spent 2 hours carrying the wreath from place to place until we laid it down at its final resting place. It was an endurance in itself. The constant rain coupled with it being a busy shopping day ahead of Christmas meant that most people had little capacity to stop and take notice, it was as if we didn’t exist at times. If we were looking to confirm the concept that people are so wrapped up and busy in their own lives that they don’t see the suffering around them, we succeeded. The juxtaposition of the stark visual of a colourful funeral wreath imprinted on people’s brains in the midst of their Christmas shopping, is a powerful subliminal message. The timing of the piece was paramount due to International Human Rights Day, but if we were to do this action again we would love to find a day of significance in summer months as the potential for engagement and participation in the summer would be even more impactful. I just want to give a huge appreciation to all those who participated in the action, to ARTCRY for funding such important, responsive political artwork, and to UNION: Northern School for Creativity and Activism where so many new ideas and friendships were born. At present Instagram has deactivated our account saying we haven’t followed community standards and account integrity! but hopefully we will be back soon. So here is our handle just in case. @deathofhumanity_action #TheDeathOfHumanity -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top photo: London. Ray Malone The post Art action: “The Death of Humanity” appeared first on Freedom News.

A CURMUDGEONLY ANARCHIST CHRISTMAS REJOINDER IS IN SOME WAYS TRUER NOW THAN IT WAS FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO ~ punkacademic ~ The 8 December 1980 edition of Freedom led with a bold call to action—BOYCOTT CHRISTMAS! A wonderfully curmudgeonly rant at ‘Capitalist Christmas’ penned by one of our predecessors, the piece veers between all-out assault on the hypocrisies of Christmas celebrations under capitalism and more poignant reflections on loneliness and mental health. At its core is a concern with Christmas as a capitalist spectacle, though it doesn’t use that term. Celebrations and forced fun are a must at Christmas to legitimise the misery in which we live. These invented rituals, which generate untold waste and whose contradictions are visible to children, have to be seen to be done. This aspect is never more true than now, with the advent (pun intended) of social media and the digital production of the self ensuring that we are all making a ‘spectacle’ of ourselves one way or another. Your present author is what academics call ‘highly situated” which translates to ‘has skin in the game’ as he is currently in Cologne making the most of sentiment, hypocrisy, and Glühwein. I feel suitably admonished by my more illustrious predecessors here, but whilst very much failing to take my past comrade’s advice on a boycott, it’s profoundly the case that the hypocrisies of Christmas are more alive and well than they were even in 1980. For our author reproduced below, the bribery of children with presents stands in lieu of the briberies we all face to forestall the social revolution. But it is arguably worse than that today. Whereas the rant below seeks to convince an audience that Christmas is a capitalist institution that masks the reality of economic dispossession, few would need convincing today whether an anarchist or no. Klarna-ing your gifts on ‘Black Friday’, most know only too well the fraudulent nature of the Christmas spectacle under capitalism. The truth is more prosaic—they feel powerless to do anything about it in a world of oligarch billionaires. The alienation of which the author speaks is now encapsulated by the Instagramming of our lives, which prizes not even the event itself, but its representation. I’ll end the same way as my predecessor, as I stumble back to the Glühwein, which is to say merry…er…wossname..thingy. —– BOYCOTT CHRISTMAS! CHRISTMAS is coming and the goose isn’t all that’s getting fat! It’s that time of year again. Crass commercialism has its once a year orgy of selling kitsch revolting commodities using even kitschier more revolting advertising. Everyone will go out and buy useless presents they don’t like and that fall to bits overnight, for people they don’t like, using money they haven’t got. There will be loads and loads of exciting spectacular events all designed to lead up to the wonderfully exciting event itself when everyone will go to endless boring events with even more endless boring relatives. Everyone will go off getting drunk, stoned, ripped and bloated for several days and then wake up hungover, down and sick and either boast about how drunk, stoned, ripped, bloated etcetera they were (oh you should have seen me on Christmas day – three turkeys, forty-eight bottles of vodka, three pounds of hash….) or else vow never never never again – till next year. In the meantime the kids are wondering what the adults are playing at – they are always the best leveller there is because they see right through the artificial game playing and are only kept from ruining the whole affair by being given brightly coloured plastic bribes. A bit like family reformism. The right concessions at the right time keep the social fabric from revolution. And then everyone goes back to work poorer but none the wiser to work harder than ever to have an even more miserable Christmas next year. Of course crass commercialism will get the blame but there’s more to it than that. For instance the suicide rate amongst single people leaps…dramatically during December. And the death rate amongst old single people is much higher just after Christmas as well as after their birthdays. Which brings us to the most important point about the whole pathetic affair. Existence has been reduced to such miserable organised boredom that without organised excuses to pretend to be happy there is no happiness and no community in this society. Not that Christmas is the only offender, there are birthdays, weddings, rock festivals…the list goes on. And Capitalist Christmas is merely a usurper on Christian Christmas which itself usurped the traditional European festivals such as the Saxon Yule. But Capitalistmas has taken alienation to a particularly advanced state of the art and anyone who had anything approaching a decent life on this muckball wouldn’t be fooled by such a pathetic, degraded and degrading imitation of life. Life – real life – as always, consists in the positive conscious creation of our own environments for ourselves, by ourselves, outside of and against all alienation, all constraints, all limitations. Anyway, have a….you know…thingummy…..er….wosoname..and…er a whatsit…er….you know….   The post Radical Reprint: The Christmas spectacle appeared first on Freedom News.

THE AUTHOR, WHO DIED 125 YEARS AGO TODAY, DEFENDED THE CREATIVE FREE INDIVIDUAL AGAINST ALL FORMS OF SOCIETAL TYRANNY ~ Maurice Schuhmann ~ On November 30, 1900, the Irish author, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (b.1854) passed away in exile in Paris. His grave in the prestigious Père Lachaise Cemetery, where the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno as well as Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue and his wife Laura also rest, has, like the grave of Doors frontman Jim Morrison, become a kind of pilgrimage site for fans. Wilde was forced into exile in 1897, immediately after his release from Reading prison. The reasons were social, legal, and personal, making life in England practically impossible. He died completely impoverished in a run-down hotel in Paris’s 6th arrondissement. Prior to that, he had been sentenced to two years of hard labour – the maximum punishment at the time for homosexuality, “the love that dare not speak its name.” He processed his time in prison in two works: De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. While the former is a very personal, essentially apolitical text, the latter contains a political dimension. His ballad is a poetic, socially critical indictment of the penal system and an expression of human solidarity, making it relevant to anarchist critiques of incarceration. The phrase “the love that dare not speak its name,” which he used in his famous courtroom speech and which did not serve to exonerate him, was shortly thereafter taken up by the German-Scottish anarchist John Henry Mackay. Writing under the pseudonym Sagitta, Mackay published his Books of the Nameless Love, initiating a tradition of homoerotic literature in Germany (from a contemporary perspective, Mackay’s works must be critically assessed, as they include, among other content, paedophilic passages). Photo: Jim Linwood on Flickr CC-BY-2.0 Oscar Wilde was, at heart, an anarchist because he defended the free, creative individual against all forms of societal tyranny. This is essentially what Emma Goldman stated in her essay The Social Significance of the Modern Drama. She referred to his text The Soul of Man under Socialism, seeing in it a consistent defense of anarchist individualism. It is therefore hardly surprising that Goldman – heavily influenced at the time by Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner – translated this text into German using Stirnerian and Nietzschean vocabulary. This translation continues to be reissued in the German-speaking world today and shapes the interpretation referenced by Emma Goldman. In The Soul of Man under Socialism, Wilde argues that true individual freedom is only possible in a society that prioritises creativity, self-realisation, and voluntary cooperation over property and coercion. He criticises both capitalism and charitable philanthropy, as both perpetuate rather than eliminate poverty. The state appears to him as the central force of oppression, preventing the individual from realising their artistic and moral potential. Wilde therefore does not conceive of socialism as state control, but as a system that provides all people with leisure and freedom to engage creatively. Such liberation from property constraints and poverty, in his view, would lead to greater individuality, increased happiness, and a truly humane society. The words that precede this work – “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.” – are likely the most frequently quoted lines from Wilde’s entire oeuvre and continue to fascinate not only anarchists. On the anniversary of his death, it is once again a good occasion to revisit his works from an anarchist perspective – and not just The Picture of Dorian Gray. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top photo: William Murphy CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 The post Echoes of Oscar Wilde appeared first on Freedom News.

THE LEGENDARY WOBBLY AND SONGWRITER, EXECUTED 110 YEARS AGO, WAS CELEBRATED WORLDWIDE FOR HIS RESILIENCE AND HUMOUR ~ Owen Clayton ~ Born Joseph Emanuel Hägglund in Sweden in 1879, Hill was brought up amid hardship after his father died when he was still a child. Without formal training, he imbibed a love of music from both parents, his father having played the organ and his mother being a talented singer. As he grew up, Hill sharpened his musical and lyrical skills by creating parody songs, something for which that he would eventually become famous. His talents also extended to cartoons, a popular working-class medium. Hill emigrated to the USA in 1902. There is patchy evidence of what he did for the next 5 years, but it presumably involved moving around the country as a transient worker, otherwise known as a hobo. These workers moved around by illegally hopping freight trains, working in mines, mills, laying railroad track, and generally building up the American capitalist West. We know that Hill was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake because he wrote about it for his boyhood paper back in Sweden. By 1908 he was in Portland, where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or ‘wobblies’), the only union that did not exclude people on the basis of ethnicity and which also tried to organise all workers, instead of just those in more ‘skilled’ positions. The wobblies believed that if all workers were in ‘One Big Union’ then this could lead to a general strike and, from there, seizure of the means of production. They eschewed party politics and the ballot box in favour of a revolutionary stance, which made them public enemy number one in what would later become America’s ‘First Red Scare’. Hill was present during the famous 1909-1910 free speech fight in Spokane, Washington. This was a struggle over a ban on the rights to free assembly and speech. The IWW called on hundreds of activists to descend on Spokane with the deliberate intention of being arrested for public speaking. Spokane’s jails were soon filled with an army of rambunctious wobblies, about whom one governor despaired that he could not get them to stop singing. The cost to the State was astronomical, and so the prisoners were eventually released and the ban lifted—an event that echoes in the ongoing Palestine Action mass arrests. Around this time, Hill and fellow wobblies began using street music to combat the Salvation Army bands that deliberately tried to drown out IWW speakers. It was a pivotal moment for the IWW, which has ever afterwards been known as a ‘singing union’: putting out regular editions of its ‘Little Red Songbook’, also known as ‘music to fan the flames of discontent’. Hill went on a prolific songwriting spree. His most famous song is ‘The Preacher and the Slave’ (also known as ‘Long Haired Preachers’), which criticises the ‘Starvation Army’ for promising ‘pie in the sky’ (a phrase that Hill invented) instead of giving more immediate help. As he had done in Sweden, Hill often adopted religious or popular melodies, partly because his songs were often parodies, but it also because this made his songs easier to learn. Hill said that ‘if a person can put a few cold, common sense facts into a song, and dress them (the facts) up in a cloak of humour…he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers’. And his music was immensely popular: of 12 songs in the 1913 edition of the Little Red Songbook, 10 were by Hill. Valuing his music as a form of propaganda, the IWW sent him to a strike location in Canada so that he could write a new song on the spot. Hill believed in the importance of reaching female workers, who were, he wrote, ‘more exploited than the men’. He wrote one of his most famous songs, ‘The Rebel Girl’, in honour of wobbly organisers like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (the term Rebel Girl is probably a pun on ‘Gurley’), Katie Farr, and Anges Thecla Fair. He also wrote letters arguing that the wobblies were spending so much time organising male workers that they were neglecting to organise women. It goes without saying that in making these arguments he was well ahead of his time. In 1911, Hill manifested his revolutionary sentiments in a more practical way. With many other wobblies, he joined the Mexican revolution that successfully deposed the US-backed dictator Porfirio Diaz. The revolution was soon betrayed, as so often happens, by its one-time Liberal allies: who, once Diaz was out of power, turned the Mexican army on the rebels. Hill was fortunate not only to escape with his life, but also to successfully return to the US. In 1913, however, his luck ran out. As is well known, he was shot in what he claimed was a dispute over a woman on the same night as a murder took place of a grocer and his son. Though the evidence was extremely flimsy, Hill’s trail judge, Morris L. Ritchie, was so biased that Hill was found guilty of those murders and sentenced to death. The IWW launched a mass public campaign about his unfair trial, though Hill expressed misgivings about becoming a martyr, or a ‘Tin-Jesus’ as he sarcastically put it. When the time finally came, he was stoic and not a little ironic: reportedly gave his firing squad the order to shoot. Just before his execution, he dashed off a poem called ‘The Last Will of Joe Hill’, which proclaims that ‘my will is easy to decide/For I have nothing to divide/My kin don’t need to fuss and moan/Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.’ The poem also expresses a wish to be cremated, which the IWW honoured. His ashes were divided into six hundred envelopes and sent around the world, so that a part of Joe Hill could inspire future generations. In one of his most famous final letters, Hill told IWW leader ‘Big’ Bill Haywood: ‘Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize’. But really it seems more appropriate to do both. Hill’s influence only grew after his death. This was in part because of the popular 1936 song-poem ‘Joe Hill’ by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson, in which Joe returns in a dream, claims that he ‘never died’, and says that he is present ‘In Every Mine and Mill/Where workers strike and organize/There you’ll find Joe Hill’. Musicians such as Joan Baez, Tom Morello, Billy Bragg and the Finnish hiphop star Paleface have all cited Hill as an inspiration. His name was even taken in homage by the horror writer Joseph Hillstrom King, the son of Stephen King (who had himself given his son the middle name Hillstrom). And most importantly, his songs are still sung in marches and on pickets lines worldwide, as workers and activists seek to fulfil Joe Hill’s promise of a better world. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Joe Hill, ‘Oh You Hoboing’, sent by letter to Charles Rudberg, 2 September 1911 The post Remembering Joe Hill appeared first on Freedom News.