From 8 to 14 October 1906, 300 representatives of local CGT groups gathered in Amiens, at what is now the Albert Roze School, to discuss and adopt a common trade-union programme. It was the ninth congress of the trade union founded in 1895, and a milestone in the history of the revolutionary workers’ movement. . On the penultimate day, 13 October, the Charter was adopted. This was followed by a two-day conference of the Bourses du Travail. The CGT itself had been founded in 1895 and, at the time of the congress, was still regarded by some like James Guillaume as standing firmly in the tradition of the International Workingmen’s Association. In 1906, it had around 300,000 members. The significance of the declaration can be seen in the following aspects: the Charter advocates both the day-to-day struggle of the working class to secure immediate improvements in its living and working conditions and the ultimate aim of abolishing capitalist exploitation as such. At the same time, it asserts the independence of trade unions from party politics of any kind. These positions are clearly expressed, for example, in the following passage: “The Congress considers that this declaration is a recognition of the class struggle which, on the economic front, pits workers in revolt against all forms of exploitation and oppression, both material and moral, perpetrated by the capitalist class against the working class. (…) As trade-union organisations, the affiliated organisations have no concern with the parties and sects which, outside and alongside them, are free to pursue social transformation.” The declaration is now regarded as a founding document of revolutionary syndicalism, comparable in significance to Rudolf Rocker’s Principles of Anarcho-Syndicalism (1919) for that particular tendency. In Germany, revolutionary syndicalism can be compared with the positions of localism, from which the Free Workers’ Union of Germany – Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands (FAUD) emerged. Although revolutionary syndicalism overlaps with anarcho-syndicalism, the two tendencies should nevertheless be clearly distinguished. Revolutionary syndicalism can be understood as a political and economic current within the workers’ movement which regards trade unions as the principal means of overcoming capitalism and establishing a self-managed society. It is therefore a revolutionary trade-union strategy. Anarcho-syndicalism employs the same strategy, but combines it with anarchist principles. Anarcho-syndicalist tendencies only became discernible in France from the early 1920s onwards and found organisational expression in 1926 with the founding of the CGT-SR (Confédération générale du travail – Syndicaliste révolutionnaire), from which the CNT-F later emerged. The Charter of Amiens did not, of course, emerge in a vacuum. From 1904 onwards, the syndicalist George Sorel had been propagating revolutionary-syndicalist ideas in trade-union newspapers, and in 1908 he published Réflexions sur la violence, another key work of revolutionary syndicalism. One year before the adoption of the Charte d’Amiens, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in the United States. Its unionist concept overlaps with revolutionary syndicalism in several respects, particularly in its emphasis on trade-union independence and on the general strike as a weapon of the working class. The Charter also shaped the debates surrounding the trade-union question at the International Anarchist Congress held in Amsterdam in 1907. One of the speakers was the Italian Errico Malatesta, who criticised the exclusive focus on syndicalism in his contribution Syndicalism: An Anarchist Critique, thereby making an important contribution — still relevant today — to the question of the relationship between anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism. A contrasting position was taken by the French activist Pierre Monatte, who placed his hopes in the trade unions as the agents of social revolution. With the outbreak of the First World War, the Charter lost much of its significance and was superseded by other principles. After the First World War, anarcho-syndicalism also emerged as a distinct tendency, developing the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism further by giving them a clearly anarchist orientation. Today, a commemorative plaque at the school recalls the congress and the Charter adopted there, to which several trade unions in France still nominally refer, including the CNT-F. The plaque bears the following inscription: “On 13 October 1906, the Charter of Amiens was adopted at the 15th National Trade Union Congress of the C.G.T. The independence of trade unions from political parties and sects. C.G.T. Force Ouvrière.” The post The birth of revolutionary syndicalism appeared first on Freedom Press.

Can you talk about your political background? Any people, events, or texts that influenced you? It’s difficult to give one person because the collective was always important to me, I think collectives are vital for people to flourish as human beings, so I never want to put people on a pedestal. But I would say that obviously Crass was really big for me, because at a time when there was a massive stigma around things like women’s sexual health or Britain’s “adventures” throughout the world, I absolutely admired that they were never afraid to speak out. I am a person of the left, my family were trade unionists, I was a trade union rep for a while, my brothers were, my dad was, so that’s where I came from. But in the context of the left I had questions, I didn’t think it was right to verbally support regimes that suppressed people, because I could see some of the regimes of the “left” around the world, and to me they were almost as bad as the regimes on the right. So I think Crass underlined that, one of the phrases that they had was “left or right it’s all shite”, I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but that started me questioning things that I’d never previously thought about, being very entrenched in being a person of the left. Then it was the Falklands War – I was coming towards the end of my secondary school in Birmingham, I was very aware of it, the schoolkids would turn up waving Union Jacks and stuff, and to me from whichever perspective you tried to look at it, it was colonialism, and I could never, ever tie myself to any brand of colonialism. But the intimidation of people that spoke out against it at that time, you could get punched in the face as quickly as you’d said something. I just got shoved, but you almost had to be very brave to really stand up and speak. More so then than now, patriotism was extremely important to quite a lot of people, even if they didn’t understand the context of what was going on, the default position was “oh you must stand behind the troops”. Well of course, anyone who goes into uniform, and acts upon the wishes of the State – we don’t want them to get killed, you know? Same on the Argentinian side, even though it was a fascist regime. There’s one book in particular that really did something for me, and I never knew about it, it just arrived one day in my hands: Days of War, Nights of Love by CrimethInc., that book to me was incredible. I’d read lots and lots of books and pamphlets before, but this one phrased it in such a down-to-earth, simple way, and it brought humour into it and humour is essential if we’re gonna liberate ourselves as human beings. Where would you draw the line in terms of bands Napalm might refuse to perform with? On the flipside, is there actually a moment where it’s okay to party with someone who doesn’t share your values? We’ve always either jumped off bills, or given the promoter a choice, whether it’s with openly fascist bands or with fascist tendencies, we’ve done that every time. I can make that choice, I don’t have to play that gig, or Napalm as a collective doesn’t have to play that gig. So yeah we have done that. But that doesn’t mean to say that I’m not going to play on a bill with a band that has someone that’s, just for example, a Trump supporter. What’s the point of that? Because at some point you have to understand that if we’re going to move forward as human beings we actually have to talk, and have dialogue, and be around people that we don’t necessarily agree with. I think sometimes the left struggles with that concept, it just shuts everybody out. But freedom for everybody, not just for me, not just for you – it means everybody, even people that we don’t agree with. Vanessa Castillo, NPR Any music or art scene is just a microcosm of what’s out there in the rest of the world. People might try to tell you otherwise, but it’s no different. So in daily life we’re going to have to deal with things that we don’t particularly like, we’re gonna have to bite our tongue a little bit, and it’s the same in the music scene. I have played and will play with bands where I don’t share the views of those people, but it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t play with them, and of course there are different degrees. There are people who have conservative viewpoints far removed from mine, but I actually like them as people. I don’t hate them as people, I don’t exclude them; we diverge – but that shouldn’t stop you from connecting with your fellow human beings. If bands and fans have a responsibility to challenge oppression in practice, what does that look like? Napalm does, of course, we’ve never not done that, because it’s important to do it. At the end of the day we’re a purveyor of art, so the way we do that we include it in our lyrics, we include in our art, when we play gigs we speak about it on stage, we’re never afraid to do that. If you’ve ever seen any live stuff of Napalm Death you will see that, and that’s any gig, doesn’t matter where we are in the world, it’s consistent. So that’s really all I can say to that, unfortunately I don’t have a magic machine that can change everything, but we do what we are able and capable of doing. Because let’s be honest, not everybody in the world, if we are going to move to a point where we have true freedom, not everybody can do everything. Some people are capable of some things, others can do others. For me what I do in my life and what I do with my art, I do as I see fit and as I can do. Many people in the mainstream have heard of Napalm Death, but they probably never get past that to the lyrics. Do you feel like with your best efforts you still end up being a commodity? When I go to metal festivals where Napalm get asked to play I will meet a lot of people who are on the same wavelength as us. Just because their music doesn’t translate into that wider effect it doesn’t mean it’s less relevant. It’s almost accidental sometimes, that a lot of bands where their lyrics don’t get talked about but the desire and the will are definitely there. It’s obviously not the bands’ fault, but yeah it’s difficult … sometimes I get frustrated because the things that Napalm does that you would hope would have an impact in a certain direction and it just doesn’t, you know. Sometimes you’re just at the hands of fate (and I use this word very loosely), what you do is you put your stuff out there, and sometimes it can be a glorious accident that what you did achieves the effect that you wanted, and actually I would say 90 times out of 100 you’re not going to achieve what you wanted, you know. But on the other occasion you do. People that don’t know bands from the inside out, probably their minds would be blown by the amount of stuff that just kind of sails down the river, that never gets talked about, and the moments that do hit home are few and far between, so it can be tricky like that. Animal liberation was always a thing for me, that’s frustrating to me because we’re not getting far enough, even though people talk about “a nation of animal lovers” we’re still now really not significantly further down the line in giving liberation to sentient beings, ending the misery of the abattoir. So that frustrates me, because in the end, the reason we do this is not because it makes us feel good, and this is my perspective, yes you have to take pleasure from something but I don’t do it to put myself on a pedestal, I do it because of artistic satisfaction, artistic achievement, and also that we achieve results in terms of general liberation. So needless to say, Napalm has been going since 1981, have we achieved the things that we might necessarily wish to see in the world? No we haven’t, of course we haven’t, but we’re gonna keep pluggin’ away for as long as we are, and that’s it really. I do get frustrated but you can’t stay frustrated for too long because that’s not gonna help you in the end, you have to move past it and start on the next thing. You often speak against violence, how do you feel about anarchists joining military formations to resist the Russian invasion of Ukraine? I believe in non-violent anarchism, I think violence is never the answer, and I underline that because how are we going to move forward if we just keep doing the same thing that the old regimes have made us believe are legitimate to do so, to commit State sponsored murder against other people? I just think that’s something we have to completely eradicate. Vanessa Castillo, NPR I can’t give you the absolute answer about how, it would be naive to even try and do that, but I think we have to move towards that point of consciousness. And I would be surprised if Russian anarchists were fighting for the Russian military, because the sort of policies that Putin has been pushing in the last 10 years have no basis in human dignity, human rights; discrimination against trans people, gay people, people who are murdered in Russia. I’m sure there’s other places too, even in the UK, but the intimidation, the threats, the violence over there is another level. And on the Ukrainian side of course we know about these very ultra-nationalist, fascist groups that seem to mingle in a very strange way with the rest of the population, when you were seeing in Maidan Square ten years ago the fascist groups … so it’s a very difficult one. Finally, what’s the future for Napalm? Will we see you on a 50-year tour in a few years? I will continue, not speaking for the other guys you know, I will continue to the point where I feel that what Napalm offers live and on record is creative and interesting and exciting. If it starts to feel not that anymore I just wouldn’t do it. Honestly I don’t do things for gain, for prestige, for any of that stuff; yes it’s nice that people appreciate the band and stuff, but for me it’s more about those other achievements and if that at any point becomes compromised then I just wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to inflict a 50% version of Napalm Death on people, that undermines everything we’ve done for the last forty years. Artistic integrity is really important to us on all levels of the band basically. You know that it’s become even more of a thing these days that bands will have VIP elements to their tours, they’ll charge people extra money for some crappy fuckin’ five minutes with them, and Napalm is completely opposed to that. What’s problematic about it for me is you’re enforcing the dynamic that people are able to buy your time, buy this added significance and I don’t like that, it leaves a really fucking bad taste in my mouth, so we don’t do it. It makes me feel really uncomfortable, like a show pony, turning up in a room somewhere that people have paid all this extra money to get the Willy Wonka gold ticket, it makes my skin crawl. On a personal level I just find that stuff really uncomfortable, the whole concept of people being more important than others. For me it goes to my historic thoughts about the monarchy, which needless to say I think should be dissolved completely, I still don’t get it, how they still have this place on the pedestal like higher than all of us, and I just think it’s absolutely ridiculous. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This interview first appeared in the Winter 2026 27 issue of Freedom anarchist journal. The post Barney Greenway: “Moments that hit home are few and far between” appeared first on Freedom Press.

REVIEW OF JULIAN LANGER (2025), NOAH’S CHOICE: ON THE REVOLT OF THE FLESH, SELF-PUBLISHED ~ Ludos Strigos ~ I would not be surprised to find this text being studied in philosophy and literature departments fifty years from now. This massive book – over 400 pages, mostly substantive writing – is an exercise in simultaneous philosophy and self-narration. Around 100 pages are poetry, the appendices consist of academic-style pieces and a short story, and there are also photographs and drawings on some pages. Langer’s preferred means of expression is to provide a numbered series of reflections and aphorisms loosely related to the title topic. Rather than providing an argument, the different passages circle around the topic in a way that weaves together a definite perspective. They typically intersperse brief discussions of a bewildering array of philosophers, anarchists, novelists, political celebrities (etc.), with the author’s own experience and emotional reactions, and his reflections on life, nature, poetry, et al. Langer identifies as an eco-anarchist and nihilist. He refers continuously to existentialist and absurdist writers, such as Nietzsche, Camus, Shestov, Kafka, and Buber. At one point he defines his position as bioexistentialist: an identification with one’s body as self-creating, free, and responsible. The titular revolt of the flesh is a visceral, embodied resistance to dying, fuelled by a kind of meaningless life-affirmation. Certain themes run through the fragmentary book, and all the different modes of expression it contains. Langer views revolt, struggle, and life as absurd and futile, yet necessary, acts. The Biblical character Noah figures prominently as an archetype of such futile yet beautiful preservation. Langer is consistently hostile to any kind of reformist, system-based solution to ecological and other problems. He also constantly criticises modern civilisation and rationalism. In the introduction, he explains his preference for autobiographical and aphoristic writing over systematic philosophy, and his attempt to avoid offering solutions, because no ultimate solutions exist. The first quarter of the book consists of a series of poems, the themes including embodied healing through nature, critiques of ownership, visions of nature as life, place-based reciprocity, memory and haunting, human temporariness, ecological awareness, shared intimacy, and acceptance of grief. The remainder of the book consists mainly of the aphoristic prose pieces. The essay ‘On Love’ summarises and criticises different philosophical conceptions of love before arriving at a personal position which affirms love as free, chosen, risky, and irreducible to ideology. Love is associated with life-affirmation, and contrasted with absolutism, duty, and capture. ‘The Philosophy of Ecological Despair’ is a wide-ranging meditation on ecological collapse and the possibility of living meaningfully amidst devastation. ‘Death’s Absurdity’ insists on a view of death as ordinary, and yet absurd and unspeakable. ‘Tanz’ is a philosophical and personal affirmation of dance as a mode of life-affirmation, rebellion, immediacy, and healing. ‘Nihilism and Weird Positivity’ handles themes of nihilism, absurdism, negation, and life-affirmation, as well as a critique of what Langer terms micro-authoritarianism as well as all claims to a singular true path. Langer defines authentic nihilism as a means to clear the field for rewilding and creation. ‘Stories of Plague and Revolt’ is a series of reflections on chronic illness, healing, ecology, and philosophy, grounded in Langer’s lived bodily experience. Illness reshapes life; health is a desire and practice of care, not a duty. ‘The Wandering Diasporic’ reflects on population movements, anti-immigrant bigotry, colonialism, and nationalism, interweaved with the author’s experience. Diaspora and exile are treated both as types of loss and as spaces of possibility. In ‘Reflections on Preservationist Ethics/Aesthetics’ Langer rejects ideologies that seek to conserve civilisation, deny death, or systematise life, while affirming preservation as care for living presence and possibility rather than form, image, or permanence. ‘Individualist-Holism’ frames life as an experience without inherent problems or solutions, where joy, suffering, care, and harm coexist. The piece engages with what Langer sees as the paradox of being an individual while also being part of a whole. ‘What Rot’ is an attack on conservatism, which for Langer encompasses various leftists such as Chomsky and Žižek along with typical rightists. Conservatism is depicted as obsessed with preserving images, ideologies, or control, which ultimately stifles growth, tenderness, and authenticity. ‘The Tribal Surviving the Last Man-kind’ suggests that true life and resilience emerge from tribal care, wildness, and embodied relationships with the Earth and others, rather than political, religious, or techno-industrial structures. Tribal living might therefore survive the collapse of ‘Leviathan,’ or modern industrial society. Echoing Buber’s famous book, ‘I-Thou’ sets out an existential position opposed both to organised religion and secular scientism. Christianity, Satanism, humanism, and scientism are portrayed as frequently indistinguishable in their reliance on hierarchical metaphysics and moral coercion. Langer here makes a case for animism and neo-paganism based on a view of matter as living, and on I-Thou relationality. ‘L’Chaim’ argues for a sustained affirmation of life for its own sake, in opposition to ressentiment and a series of anti-life ideologies such as technocracy. The last two aphoristic pieces, ‘Catastrophe and Genesis’ and ‘Noah’s Choice,’ deal with the themes of disaster and preservation. Langer ceases to ground responses in embodied life rather than reason, and focuses on the question of how to live, be, and survive amid ongoing disaster. Courage, presence, and love are seen as lived rebellion, and philosophy is framed as a primal choice between affirmations of life or of death. After a short list of resolutions, there follow the ‘Appendices,’ which are more formal prose works such as conference presentations. ‘Deterritorialising Ability’ argues that disability is not deficit but a manifestation of diverse forms of power, presence, and agency. Care and listening are juxtaposed to deficit models, control, and cure. ‘Revolting Folk Religions and Dialogic Praxis’ juxtaposes monological truth-claims with dialogical approaches grounded in mutual presence, openness, lived encounter, and life-affirmation. While these pieces read like academic texts, the third appendix, ‘Cancer, Technology and the Ineffable Visceral Space,’ is a deeply personal account of surviving brain cancer. Langer here recounts radical changes in his bodily experience due to invasive therapies and new prostheses, as well as a depression-like ‘limit-experience’ following therapy. Langer recounts his disenchantment with religion and recourse to existentialism to recover a basis for living. The appendices also contain a short story, ‘The Autobiography of John Lynch,’ which addresses issues of hallucination, the hippie movement, love, and violence. This is an intriguing and inspiring book, addressing the deepest questions of existence in a distinctly ecological and anarchist way. Most of the time, Langer doesn’t really make a case for his point of view, preferring to express strings of judgements and claims which are persuasive, if at all, in a poetic way. The scope of the commentary is immense, but the dismissals and classifications of others’ positions are subjective and too often unexplained. A reader with an attachment to any of the many chosen targets will likely feel they are dismissed unfairly. If someone can get past this, however, the book offers a unique point of view with implications for our own lives. I sometimes wonder if the book’s wisdom is actually a kind of disavowal; it seems impossible to affirm and experience joy in something one has stripped of meaning, such that I wonder if it can be done without maintaining some unconscious belief in the meaning one denies. Still, Langer’s message will prove vital for many, and stimulating for those who are not fully convinced. The post Book review: Anarcho-existentialist wisdom appeared first on Freedom News.

THE DEBATE OVER THE TERM ‘ANARCHISM’ AS AN ASSET OR LIABILITY REARS ITS HEAD IN THIS COMMENT PIECE FROM 1966 ~punkacademic~ Back in February 1966 Freedom wasn’t thinking forward to the World Cup that year (or whether there’d be a boycott, for that matter), but instead contemplating a question that bugs all of us trying to promote our beliefs amongst the public. This was the issue of the ‘A’ word – you know the one, anarchism – and whether or not its historical baggage makes it more hassle than its worth when trying to promote, well, anarchism. This was a live question in the post-war period for the Freedom group. Colin Ward, the most familiar figure from those decades, frequently used other language to describe his views – he was particularly fond of autonomy – and on a number of occasions had to be reined in by the Group as a whole, in particular over the title of the journal Anarchy (Ward had wanted to call it Autonomy, as David Goodway notes in his long interview with Ward, Talking Anarchy). This is not to say that Ward denied he was an anarchist — quite the contrary, Ward had testified to that on plenty of occasions including explicitly in a BBC interview in 1968. But Ward’s view was that the baggage associated with the term anarchism led to its immediate dismissal from discussion in the world of ‘respectable’ political and social ideas. In Anarchy in Action, he famously used the phrase that anarchist beliefs in contemporary society had to be ‘let in the back window’. And Ward was promoting anarchist ideas beyond Freedom and Anarchy; in the 1970s he fronted a BBC documentary on community in the New Towns drawing on his professional expertise as a town planner, but it is telling that in the BBC billing he is dubbed as a ‘writer’ rather than an anarchist. Ward also wrote a series of articles in New Society, which at that time was a popular read amongst Labour-supporting intellectuals, where he described anarchism under the name of ‘self-help socialism’. His views were the same, but they were rebranded for an audience that would, he felt, be more receptive if he dropped the A-word. Did it work? The jury’s out, given that Ward’s wider activities were often conducted without his audience’s knowledge that he himself was an anarchist, and thus that the ideas they were receiving  often had anarchist origins. For Ward that was less of a problem. A key contention of Anarchy in Action, following (as Ward described himself) ‘in the Kropotkin tradition’ was that anarchism as a practice was a real, existing, everyday presence in society, conducted and enacted by people who would never even think of the ‘A’ word. On that basis, maybe Ward’s repackaged ‘self-help socialism’ cut through with some who it wouldn’t have convinced the same way if titled anarchism. But whilst that’s difficult to prove, it remains the case was that Ward’s ideas, packaged in this fashion, were seized on by politicians such as David Owen, who saw in the language of ‘self-help socialism’ a way of reconciling a Thatcherite political discourse in the later 1970s and the early 1980s with a nominal commitment to retaining the term ‘socialism’, which Ward would wholly have disagreed with. There’s a parable there. In the late 1970s, socialism as a term — one which Labour politicians of different wings of the party had used in an unproblematic and ideologically-varied way since the pre-war period – was being driven out of public discourse, as anarchism had been before it. Owen’s seizure on Ward’s language (if not his ideas), as shown in Owen’s book Face the Future, is similar to how right-wing libertarians seized on the language of mutualism to endorse privatisation. As noted above, Ward wouldn’t have agreed with Owen’s usage, just as he wouldn’t have agreed with party politics in general or Owen’s SDP in particular (although as Goodway noted in Talking Anarchy, there are similarities with SDP intellectual Michael Young’s views, which Young himself acknowledged). But that matters less here than the substantive point, that the problem of the name is less to do with the ‘baggage’ (the well-known popular imagery of assassins and bombs) than erasure and appropriation. Whilst the public can be made to be scared of any term elites choose through the hegemonic propaganda of the media, be it anarchism or socialism, what elites fear are the ideas themselves. John St. Lawrence’s piece reproduced below was an intervention in a live debate not only in the Freedom group but also in the anarchist movement more widely, and one that continues to this day. Two years after its publication, anarchism would get a shot in the arm from the student revolt in France, which explicitly drew on anarchism as well as Maoism, and which would draw the attention of the BBC to Freedom — as well as that of the police. Anarchy’s 99th edition in 1969 would pay attention to that welcome revolt and revival, and the 100th edition was Nicolas Walter’s introduction to anarchism for a wider audience. By 1969 the A-word was definitively back, and whilst its fortunes wax and wane, its usage and invocation remain vital, as John St Lawrence argues below. ———– WHAT’S IN A NAME? Freedom, February 12, 1966, Vol 27 No 5 So often anarchists are asked why don’t we find some other name with less emotive connotations. Occasionally one tries, when one finds oneself in a position where people will listen to libertarian ideas until they hear the word, or where the actions of those who share the name appear unanarchist and no advertisement. But what other name? Libertarian? Longer and sounds like Liberal or at best socialist-Liberal. Fraternalist? Koinoniaist? Communitarian socialist? Voluntarist socialist? Cooperator? All suggest withdrawal from the world as it exists, a somewhat pietist elite building an Utopia away from contamination; which even if it were desirable would be impossible. Acephalist? All right philologically but too academic. SOCIALISM AND ANARCHISM Perhaps this is to start at the wrong end; we have not yet clarified adequately what we wish to convey. One might start to equate anarchist communism with activist, applied, authentic socialism; but immediately one is faced with the necessity to insist that socialism has nothing to do with state ownership and control; and to those who quote the dictionary definition ‘principle that individual freedom should completely be subordinated to interests of community’ one has to recount the history of the International. So even if one had not as yet-used the word anarchism, it would then have to be introduced. We may now—with reason—have considerable doubts on the ideas of Bakunin; undoubtedly he devised conspiratorial forms of organization which Lenin copied to fashion Bolshevism, and at that point in his criticism of Bakunin Marx was right and more anarchist than was Bakunin. But having admitted this, the fact remains that Marx’s formulation of the State withering away was totally at variance with the rest of Marx’s analysis of power. We cannot fairly argue from the experience of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia— the only occasion when Industrial workers have ever even temporarily captured an whole nation state—that inevitably all leaders and all capture of state power must lead to tyranny, for this is an unjustifiable argument from the particular, to the general; but we can say, as Marx himself said, that never in recorded history has a ruling elite willingly surrendered power, and we can say from this that the evidence is that they probably never will. So ‘anti-state socialism, opposition to all ruling elites whether founded on the ownership of money or the control of the state apparatus’. Fair enough, but there are many socialist groups which believe sincerely that the policies that they propound at elections or within the Labour Party would lead to this; so we have to add that it is socialism with a do-it-yourself kit. However, since Marx himself said ‘the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself, it is clear that we have to add that ‘do it yourself in this context means that the working class must free itself by its own direct action to take direct control of industry and society; and that moreover we do not hold (as do, for instance, the writers of ‘Towards Socialism’) that therefore whether in a Bolshevist elite or pervading an hegemonic party, middle class intellectuals have a right to lead the workers. So immediately we have to define the role of the anarchist in trying to convert his fellows and build a mass revolutionary movement; since he does not constitute a vanguard elite any more than he believes in staying within ‘the mass party of the workers’, it is necessary to talk of militant minorities and propaganda by the need. So again, even if the word anarchism was not so far used, it would be necessary to refer to Just those parts of the anarchist past which one was presumably trying to forget, in order to show that it is possible for a revolutionary minority to act in a selfless way in order to raise the consciousness of others with no intention of later imposing leadership. ANARCHY AND COMMUNITY We are therefore trying to convey not merely the concept of anti-authoritarian socialism, not merely the need for self-activity but also the need for the absence of directing intellectuals within the movement; moreover, incidentally, that this Is not just for those who wish to opt out but a total change in society, since it is integral to anarchist thinking that where power groups exist it is their nature to attempt to expand their power. Not merely would those who were still authoritarian wish to subject any libertarian communities near them to their rule, but they would also fear them as a danger to their own power. The fact that a community within an industrially advanced society has to compete with it on terms dictated by that society; means that it must inevitably fight constantly to maintain itself or become corrupted. One may find an exceptional community, such as that at Stapleton which consistently refuses to compromise, but at the cost of continual harrying by the state, and at the cost of living without all luxuries; one finds, too, the occasional equally courageous community such as Koinonia in Kentucky, which miraculously survives despite almost weekly bomb attempts from the Klan. ANARCHISM AND SYNDICALISM Of course much of all this is denoted by Syndicalism; though now that the Liberals are talking of Democratic Syndicalism this is becoming less a synonym for an aspect of anarchism, and so it is again necessary to talk of anarcho-syndicalism to make the distinction—just as it was necessary at one stage to use the longer term to distinguish oneself from national-syndicalism. But since Syndicalism is the industrial application of anarchism there is no real distinction of terms; few will have heard of the term who have not heard of anarchism and those that have heard of a perversion of it. Syndicalism is a method for getting anarchism. This makes it in no way less important since to anarchists there is no distinction between ends and means; but though the syndicate is an anarchist society in embryo, nevertheless since anarchism is essentially pluralist not all the facets of an anarchist society will be syndicalist, and no syndicalist would deny the importance of other facets. But even by suggesting the term Syndicalist one refers back to that emotive past which the innocent inquirer thinks one ought to wish to disown. Let it be clearly admitted there is a lot in the anarchist past of which anarchists may well be ashamed; many of our foremost personalities have been essentially authoritarian in nature; many of our acts have been mistaken; people who have used our name have so behaved that at the turn of the century in France the term was used to denote armed bandits of quite apolitical and anti-social thieves; and we can all think of traditions of anarchism with which we would rather not be associated. But though there are many bad things associated with the term, not only are there immeasurably more that are good; but most of the bad ones even if we wish to disown them, we cannot do so, since it is essential to be able to refer to them in order to illustrate from the good points in them the possibilities for better for the future. John St. Lawrence. The post Radical Reprint: Who’s afraid of the A Word? appeared first on Freedom News.

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.