Anarchy.

        It is approximately a year since Stuart Christie died and the tributes still come in, this is a tribute to Stuart Christie from Kate Sharpley Library and AK Press. I'm sure comrades will be eager to place their order.

A Life For Anarchy 

 

       Over the last year have edited (and written an introduction for) A Life for Anarchy: A Stuart Christie Reader. The book contains a selection of Stuart’s writings (shorter political pieces and biographical tributes he wrote) and some of the tributes his friends and comrades paid to him.
      ‘We hope this book will give you a sense of the richness and complexity of his life. We also hope it will act as a memorial, given that we haven’t been able to meet up and celebrate his life. […]
       ‘We know that this is not the final word on Stuart’s life. Seeing the materials that people are sharing with us and the Stuart Christie Memorial Archive, we feel as though we are constantly learning more. We hope this reader gives you a sense of the breadth of his experiences, and celebrates his humanity, his morality and his intuitive grasp of anarchism.’ (from the introduction)
        Published by AK Press, it’s 280 pages long and copies will be available later in the year. Money from each copy sold will go to Stuart’s daughter, Branwen. We’ll share more information when we have it.

Salud, comrade!

Kate Sharpley Library Collective

[Top photo: Stuart working on Sanday]

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info   

  

       Stuart Christie, who dead recently was a remarkable man, an anarchist, with incredible  skills, resilience, and a remarkable history, it is wonderful that his family and friends are creating an archive of his life and work. We must always remember and record our own, the society we live under would rather such people were erased from history, we must never let that happen, we have a rich and remarkable history we should be very proud of, Stuart Christie made it that bit richer. 

The following from Kate Sharpley Library.

Stuart Christie

The Stuart Christie Memorial Archive

       Friends, family and comrades of Stuart Christie have come up with a plan to commemorate his life by creating an archive at London’s Mayday Rooms and online.
      “Stuart’s life may have been plastered with headlines, Britain’s most famous anarchist was the usual description, but the small print of it was what was important. His courage, imagination, his loyalty, not just to what he believed in, but to his friends and family, his remarkable intelligence, his self-deprecating, droll and spiky humour. He was a man of parts, each one of them remarkable.
     “To reveal the richness of Stuart’s life and the many histories he was a part of, we intend to establish a memorial archive in his name. The Stuart Christie Memorial Archive will be housed at the MayDay Rooms in Fleet Street in London.”
      Read more about the project (and donate!) at
https://www.gofundme.com/f/stuart-christie-memorial-archive

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk    

Obituary.

 

     I know a lot has been posted about Stuart Christie since his death the other day, but as an anarchist of such stature and a friend of Spirit of Revolt, we believe that it is only fitting that we should re-post the obituary by John Paton published on the Kate Sharpley Library website. 

Stuart Christie 1946-2020,

Anarchist activist, writer and publisher

John Patten

      Stuart Christie, founder of the Anarchist Black Cross and Cienfuegos Press and co-author of The floodgates of anarchy has died peacefully after a battle with lung cancer.

    Born in Glasgow and brought up in Blantyre, Christie credited his grandmother for shaping his political outlook, giving him a clear moral map and ethical code. His determination to follow his conscience led him to anarchism: “Without freedom there would be no equality and without equality no freedom, and without struggle there would be neither.” It also led him from the campaign against nuclear weapons to joining the struggle against the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco (1892-1975).

     He moved to London and got in touch with the clandestine Spanish anarchist organisation Defensa Interior (Interior Defence). He was arrested in Madrid in 1964 carrying explosives to be used in an assassination attempt on Franco. To cover the fact that there was an informer inside the group, the police proclaimed they had agents operating in Britain – and (falsely) that Christie had drawn attention to himself by wearing a kilt.

       The threat of the garotte and his twenty year sentence drew international attention to the resistance to the Franco regime. In prison Christie formed lasting friendships with anarchist militants of his and earlier generations. He returned from Spain in 1967, older and wiser, but equally determined to continue the struggle and use his notoriety to aid the comrades he left behind.

      In London he met Brenda Earl who would become his political and emotional life partner. He also met Albert Meltzer, and the two would refound the Anarchist Black Cross to promote solidarity with anarchist prisoners in Spain, and the resistance more broadly. Their book, The floodgates of anarchy promoted a revolutionary anarchism at odds with the attitudes of some who had come into anarchism from the sixties peace movement. At the Carrara anarchist conference of 1968 Christie got in touch with a new generation of anarchist militants who shared his ideas and approach to action.

        Christie’s political commitment and international connections made him a target for the British Special Branch. He was acquitted of conspiracy to cause explosions in the “Stoke Newington Eight” trial of 1972, claiming the jury could understand why someone would want to blow up Franco, and why that would make him a target for “conservative-minded policemen”.

     Free but apparently unemployable, Christie launched Cienfuegos Press which would produce a large number of anarchist books and the encyclopedic Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review. Briefly Orkney became a centre of anarchist publishing before lack of cashflow ended the project. Christie would continue publishing, and investigating new ways of doing so including ebooks and the internet. His christiebooks.com site contains numerous films on anarchism and biographies of anarchists. He used facebook to create an archive of anarchist history not available anywhere else as he recounted memories and events from his own and other people’s lives.

      Christie wrote The investigative researcher’s handbook (1983), sharing skills that he put to use in an exposé of fascist Italian terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie (1984). In 1996 he published the first version of his historical study We the anarchists : a study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 1927-1937.

       Short-run printing enabled him to produced three illustrated volumes of his life story (My granny made me an anarchist, General Franco made me a ‘terrorist’ and Edward Heath made me angry 2002-2004) which were condensed into a single volume as Granny made me an anarchist : General Franco, the angry brigade and me (2004). His final books were the three volumes of ¡Pistoleros! The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg, his tales of a Glaswegian anarchist who joins the Spanish anarchist defence groups in the years 1918-1924.

      Committed to anarchism and publishing, Christie appeared at many bookfairs and film festivals, but scorned any suggestion he had come to ‘lead’ anyone anywhere.

        Christie’s partner Brenda died in June 2019. He slipped away peacefully, listening to “Pennies From Heaven” (Brenda’s favourite song) in the company of his daughter Branwen.

Stuart Christie, 10 July 1946-15 August 2020

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

May Day.

     May Day, a day when the ordinary people should be on the green, in the park, on the streets, celebrating their solidarity, struggles, victories and meeting up with old friends, making new friends, and building on that solidarity between the ordinary people of this world for future battles to create that better world for all. A time to recall those past champions of working class struggles and discussing how we can take their dream forward.

      Of course the pandemic has put a hold on those celebrations in the open air, but we can still let our voices be heard through what ever method that is available to us, we are the creators, the builders, in this world, we can use our imagination to keep those May Day ideas and that solidarity and community spirit alive. There will be virtual groupings, individual renderings, but whatever, join in, or do your own thing to remember why we celebrate  May Day, our day, a day to show we are all one people and one day we will take this world and shape it for benefit of all our people. 

A May Day greeting from Kate Sharpley Library:

Welcome! First off, some listening:     The Final Straw Radio Podcast have put up a long conversation with Barry Pateman in which they ‘talk about anarchist history, community, repression, defeat, insularity, popular front with authoritarian Marxists, class analysis and how to beat back capitalism.’       If you’ve heard Barry talk before, you’ll know he’s not one to dish out easy answers. This is no exception, and he demands that we respect the lives of past anarchists, and never reduce them to ‘pawns to support our arguments now.’ (38 min. mark) There’s a fair bit on how important (and how challenging) it is to record the lives of the unknown militants. These are the ones who made up the movement: without writing anything, sometimes never reading any of the ‘essential anarchist texts’. There’s plenty, too, on the need (and challenge of how) to talk to non-anarchists. Interesting stuff, and well put together.      You can listen at https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2020/04/26/barrypateman2020/

Happy Mayday!

      You can get the full text of our "Mayday and Anarchism" pamphlet here https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/59zwk6
(Just find the 'view PDF' button at the end)
      We've put up a report about Alexandria's mayday in 1921: "May Day in the Land of the Pharaohs" https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/sqvcj3
      "The 1918 flu pandemic in the CNT media" by Miguel G is here https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/k6dm37
      and finally, for some true unknown militants, we have a translation of Imanol's article on "Women's participation in the Allied escape lines" https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/18948f. That's Ana María Martínez Sagi – anarchist, poet, sports star, journalist, lesbian and member of the resistance in France – at the top of the email.

Take care of yourselves, from all at the KSL

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Remembering Our Own, Albert Meltzer.

       We should always remember our own, those who stood up and fought on the side of the ordinary people against the injustices and inequalities of this repugnant capitalist system.

     January 7th. marks the 100th. anniversary of the birth of staunch anarcho-communist, conscientious objector, Albert Meltzer who died almost five years ago on the 7th. May 1996.

      This extract is from the Kate Sharpley Library and is by his friend and comrade Stuart Christie:

 Albert Meltzer with Stuart Christie

Albert Meltzer, anarchist

Stuart Christie

         Albert Meltzer was one of the most enduring and respected torchbearers of the international anarchist movement in the second half of the twentieth century. His sixty-year commitment to the vision and practice of anarchism survived both the collapse of the Revolution and Civil War in Spain and the Second World War; he helped fuel the libertarian impetus of the 1960s and 1970s and steer it through the reactionary challenges of the Thatcherite 1980s and post-Cold War 1990s.
      Fortunately, before he died, Albert managed to finish his autobiography, I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels, a pungent, no-punches pulled, Schvejkian account of a radical twentieth century enemy of humbug and injustice. A life-long trade union activist, he fought Mosley's Blackshirts in the battle of Cable Street, played an active role in supporting the anarchist communes and militias in the Spanish Revolution and the pre-war German anti-Nazi resistance, was a key player in the Cairo Mutiny [after] the Second World War, helped rebuild the post-war anti-Franco resistance in Spain and the international anarchist movement. His achievements include Cuddon's Cosmopolitan Review, an occasional satirical review first published in 1965 and named after Ambrose Cuddon, possibly the first consciously anarchist publisher in the modern sense, the founding of the Anarchist Black Cross, a prisoners' aid and ginger group and the paper which grew out of it - Black Flag.
        However, perhaps Albert's most enduring legacy is the Kate Sharpley Library, probably the most comprehensive anarchist archive in Britain. 

Read the full article HERE: 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

France, May-June 1968.

      To mark the 50th anniversary of the  1968 May-June events that shook France and reverberated throughout Europe, the Kate Sharpley Library have brought out a excellent pamphlet, written by a participating eyewitness at the time,  Flûtiste Le (the flute player). How have we moved forward in 50 years?

 Flûtiste Le:  The Anarchists in Paris, May-June 1968

       An anarchist eyewitness to the revolt of May-June 1968, Le Flûtiste ("the flute player") looks back on the highs and lows of Paris' student-worker rebellion. Topics covered include, student life before the revolt, the barricades of the Latin Quarter, the student and worker occupations and strikes and the part played by the anarchists in the upheaval.
      "Having been hit by a grenade and come under gas attack, I had made up my mind to join the demonstration at Denfert-Rochereau. ... First I watched as the head of the demo paraded past, made up of trade union bigwigs and their henchmen; then came heaps of more or less unknowns such as the Situationist Guy Debord whom I spotted on his own, just him and a friend. Then, all of a sudden, my eyes were treated to the unbelievable spectacle of a forest of black-and -red flags, with a sprinkling of black flags! ... The public's curiosity about and interest in anarchist ideas was born right there and then. Anarchy, which the Stalinists and socialists generally - not to mention the bourgeois - had declared a dead duck in the land of Utopia, was rising like the phoenix from the ashes! Its burial licence had expired, to the great annoyance of all those respectable folk."

This extract/review from Freedom Press:

        First of all, on the outbreak of the fighting in Paris, between 300-400 anarchists were attending the gala of the Federation Anarchiste that evening in central Paris on May 10th. Members of other groups were present on that evening, including the Union of Anarchist Communist Groups, the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union and the anarcho-syndicalist union the CNT.These were on hand to reinforce the barricades that were set up that evening in the Latin Quarter, a culmination of weeks of unrest in the universities. To his credit Dany Cohn-Bendit of the March 22nd student movement used his megaphone to call for the taking over of the area. The writer describes this then anarchist as “hard to stick” as a person(more on that later).

       “Get this: what few leftwing or “leftist” students there were on hand tried to talk them of digging up the streets or building barricades and berated the barricade builders as “provocateurs”. They were promptly seen off…”

      The writer describes the lightning spread of barricades through the neighbourhood.”The clashes were violent in the extreme; many young people refused to give ground (to the police) and like out-and-out kamikazes, threw themselves into the hand-to-hand fighting”. He also notes that “local residents, outraged by the sight of the police brutality, sided with the students, tossing down buckets of water to dampen the effects of tear gas grenades and taking demonstrators into their homes”.As a result of the fighting and the vicious brutality the trade unions and left wing organisations were forced into calling a demonstration for May 13th. Over the coming days strikes broke out spontaneously around France.

         The leftists now attempted to hijack the movement, setting up literature stalls in the courtyard of Sorbonne university and token committees that they controlled.

The demonstration on May 13th brought out between 500,000 to one million people. The writer notes the “forest of red-and-black flags with a sprinkling of black flags”.

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

Kate Sharpley Library.

     Kate Sharpley: During the war she left her job with a baker and worked in a Woolwich munitions factory. She was among the first people active in the shop stewards movement. Her father and brother were killed in action and her boyfriend (active in the anarcho-syndicalistic Horse Transport Union) was listed as missing believed killed. She suspected, though she had no proof, that he had been shot for mutiny. At the age of 22, when called to receive her family's medals from Queen Mary (wife of George V) she threw the medals back at her, saying "if you like them so much you can have them". The Queen's face was scratched, Kate Sharpley was beaten by police, and imprisoned for a few days, though no charges were brought against her. She was fired from her job at the factory.

      The Kate Sharpley Library is a wonderful asset to anarchists and libertarian socialists across the world, it is an Aladdin’s cave of our history, to learn from and enjoy. A wealth of information that we can dip into, indulge in, or wallow in.

      Their latest bulletin, October No.88, is now on line for all to enjoy. We should always support such rich veins of our history, we can't expect the establishment to record our history for us.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk