St. Imier.

 

150 years on, St Imier is thriving

             

          July 19th sees the first sessions of a five-day celebration of anarchist thought in the Swiss border town that hosted the visionaries of a definitive, and historic, break with Marxism.
         St Imier is as far as history tells, one of those legendary events which would mark the moment in which anarchism finally nailed itself to the extra-Parliamentary path. In the years since Proudhon famously asked What is Property? and declared himself an anarchist in 1840 the movement had, for the most part, been travelling alongside and debating with more statist positions, most famously through the First International, to which famous libertarian intellectuals such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin belonged.
         But in the wake of the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, amid increasing political rancour between Bakunin and the more authoritarian tendencies rallied around Marx, both Bakunin and a second leading anarchist, James Guillaume, were expelled causing an irrevocable split.
        The following year two organisations, the Italian Federation and Swiss Jura Federation, went on to organise an alternative international congress – St Imier. A veritable who’s who of the time’s famous anarchist organisers from Errico Malatesta to Jean-Louis Pindy were part of delegations from Spain, Italy, France, the US and Switzerland, which passed four key resolutions:

1. A rejection of the increasingly authoritarian and centralised nature of the First International,
2. A pact of friendship to stand against such authoritarian behaviour in future,
3. A declaration that the proletariat’s first duty was to destroy all political power, including the party form,
4. That the task of emancipation could only be carried out through the free federation of all producer groups, based upon solidarity and equality.

          That declaration, spread across the continent in the following weeks, months, and years, would go on to form a core of anarchist thought in Europe.

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Kropotkin.

 

           Last wee reminder, tonight, Red Rosa's 195 London Road, Calton, Glasgow. Start of Red and Black Clydesides's May Week Celebrations, Kropotkin Night. Learn more about the man and his ideas, a must for those looking to create that better world for all.

 

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Kropotkin.

 

          To kick off Red and Black Clydeside, May Week celebrations, a bit early, but to get you in the mood. We start with a Kropotkin Night at Red Rosa's 195 London Road, Calton, Glasgow. Come along and get to know a wee bit more about the man and his ideas. Get to know more about The Paris Commune and the Kronstadt Revolt and lots in between.

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

The State Can Never Be A Vehicle For Freedom.

         Anarchists are, at least consistent in one thing, the state can never be a vehicle to freedom. Be it a "socialist" state, Communist" state, a "representative democracy" state, they all walk the same road, control of the people in the hands of the few. For this consistency, many anarchists have paid with their lives, "revolutionary" state after "revolutionary" state, has hounded, exiled, imprisoned and murder anarchist, whose crime has been the belief that the people should control their own lives.

    Crimethinc has produced a excellent article highlighting some of those anarchists from the past, who paid dearly for their continuing struggle for freedom in the face of "revolutionary" states.

Restless Specters of the Anarchist Dead

A few words from the undead of 1917.

          This year is the centennial of two revolutions in Russia: one in which the people toppled the Tsar and another in which the Bolsheviks seized state power. Within twenty years, the Bolsheviks had executed or imprisoned most of those who carried out the revolution. Today, as the hashtag #1917live trends on twitter, we should remember the #1917undead, the anarchists who strove to warn humanity that statist paths towards social change will never bring us to freedom. Some of them, like Fanya and Aron Baron, were murdered in cold blood by authoritarian communists in the Soviet Union. Others managed to survive, betrayed by their supposed comrades, to witness the totalitarian results of the Bolshevik coup. Their voices cry out to us today from the grave. Let’s listen.

Read the full article HERE:

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

Poverty and Hunger, The Necessities Of Capitalism.

        To those who need a little explaining as to how capitalism and poverty go hand in hand, and why poverty is necessary for capitalism to function, you could do worse than read the article by Simon Springer, of the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada,  called Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger:

          Poverty is rooted in the accumulation of wealth, a process that plays out through the dispossession of the many so as to secure excess for the few. While this insight is commonly assigned to Karl Marx (1867) and particularly his understanding of primitive accumulation set forth in the first volume of Capital, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1890) had worked out the contradictory underpinning of capitalism several decades earlier with his inquiry into the principle of right and of government, where he declared “property is theft!” Indeed, the very possibility of poverty, and its expression as famine, is rooted in the institution of property itself. If famine requires a combination of political, production and market shocks” as Alex De Waal (2017) argues, then it is a construction of capital-ism, unfurled when and where it is deemed appropriate by state elites holding the reigns of power. For Peter Kropotkin (1906: 220),“ it was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating ‘surplus value,’ of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that that made capitalists.” I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I can't help but want to know what made poverty? Kropotkin (1906: 220) provides a partial answer when he suggests that,“ if the number of poor rapidly increased during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that followed the founding of States” .So we are starting to see a picture where capitalism and the state come together as indeed they always have as a dialectics of violence. Through the process of violent expropriation, people were taught to accept“ the principle of wages, so dear to exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practised” (Kropotkin, 1906, p. 220). The history of capitalism accordingly suggests that poverty is always and only ever the effect of property, for in its historical and ongoing wars of plunder (Le Billon, 2012), capitalism seeks to secure the right of proprietorship. In order to create poverty it was first necessary to establish property. It was in the form of dispossession that deficiency, deprivation, and destitution first became possible. Consequently, in its most rudimentary form, capitalism is a process that ensures the production of hunger. As Kropotkin (1906:178) put it, “the threat of hunger is man's best stimulant for productive work” and to secure the lock on that cage, one must be stripped of all possession and removed from their connection to the soil, where the material basis of life is appropriated by private interest. In de Waal's account of famine I was particularly impressed with his refusal of the general pornography of violence that exists. Famine isn't as direct as mass execution in gas chambers, and so its slow temporal burn (Nixon, 2011; Springer, 2012) and diffuse geographical embers receive far less attention (Springer, 2011). Yet to me this is precisely what makes famine so compelling. If the original definition of genocide advanced by Rafael Lemkin “ dedicates more detail and space to …the use of starvation as an in-strument of extermination, persecution and inhumanity, than to mass killing” as De Waal (2017) argues, then indeed this should tell us something quite profound about famine as an instrument of control. With this being the case, then perhaps capitalism can be understood as the systemic and pervasive spectre of genocide, for privation of the majority is precisely what capitalism procures as a state of permanent being. This condition is produced through the private appropriation of all material needs land, water, housing,food, and tools the result of which is both the institutionalization of property, and a widespread reliance on wages as people are stripped of their ability to subsist off the land. One is enslaved by This system, where refusing it means starvation. The only thing that prevents our genocide is the acceptance of wages, an agreement that secures our political value. Without this exchange our lives are rendered useless to capital.

Read the full article HERE:
    Please cite this article in press as: Springer, S., Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger,

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

Kropotkin's Speech.

        We at Spirit of Revolt are always delighted when we can put one of our gems from history up for the general public to enjoy on our "Read of the Month", This month it is Kropotkin's speech at the Memorial Hall London on October 21st., 1909. The speech was given to honour  Francisco Ferrer Guardia an educator and founder of “Modern Schools”, which taught radical social values. In spite of the fact that there was no evidence against him, he was executed by the Spanish state, by firing squad on October 13th. 1909.  Spirit of Revolt is fortunate to have an original copy of that speech, and are delighted to share it with the public at large.

Read the speech on line HERE:

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

Mutual Aid Or Extinction

       That cornerstone of anarchism, mutual aid, a very natural attitude in humans, hindered, thwarted, stifled and denied under the rules of capitalism.  However, it is also necessary for us to solve the problems that humanity face today, and in all probability, our only chance of survival. Capitalism creates poverty for the many, widens inequality and rapes the planet in search for resources to exploit for profit for the few. Mutual aid benefits all who participate and wider afield. If we continue with capitalism, we will continue with the injustice, inequality, poverty and an ever increasing myriad of wars and other "crises", the end product being a ravished environment and a high possibility of species extinction. It seems such a simple choice, it is odd that we don't grasp it with both hands and enthusiasm. Capitalism must go, it must be seen as humanity's darkest hour, it must be destroyed and written into the history books as a precautionary lesson for future generations. We are capable of helping one and other, we enjoy doing so, we have the ability and the resources, we are capable of creating that society where the foundations are mutual aid, co-operation, free association, sustainability, seeing to the needs of all our people, and the environment we depend on for survival.

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

Vive Le Commune!!

       Overthrown, but not conquered, the Commune in our days is born again. It is no longer a dream of the vanquished, caressing in imagination the lovely mirage of hope. No! the ‘commune’ of today is becoming the visible and definite aim of the revolution rumbling beneath our feet.” Kropotkin on the Paris Commune.

       Another interesting article by Jerome Roos from Roar Mag. Well worth reading the full article. 

What Is the Commune?

----------- Historically speaking, communal ways of organizing social life long precede the development of the modern state, and humanity on the whole has spent far more time living communally than it has under capitalism.

        To an extent, historical experience therefore lends credence to the proposition that, in the long run, the commune-form might secure a far more stable social order than the state-form, whose contradictory unity with crisis-prone finance capital renders it increasingly vulnerable to social conflict and systemic chaos, not to mention ecological catastrophe. On this point, indigenous communities and peasant communes may hold some important clues for the identification of alternative developmental pathways—which helps explain why theorists like Marx and Kropotkin spent many years studying such pre-capitalist societies.

         Nevertheless, there are clearly important differences between these ancient communal forms and the type of revolutionary commune of which we are speaking here, not least in terms of the latter’s emancipatory, future-oriented and internationalist horizon. Crucially, the modern commune fully embraces the expansiveness and universality of the socialist ideal. To paraphrase Subcomandante Marcos, whose Zapatista movement has formed its own indigenous communes in southern Mexico, the revolutionary commune is “not a dream from the past [or] something that came from our ancestors. It comes to us from the future; it is the next step that we have to take.”-------

       We count on the present generation to bring about the social revolution within the commune, to put an end to the ignoble system of bourgeois exploitation, to rid the people of the tutelage of the state, to inaugurate a new era of liberty, equality, solidarity in the evolution of the human race.”

Read the full article HERE:

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

St. IMIER INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS.

Report back from the St. Imier Congress, Switzerland, August 2012

by Miss Noire (no relation to Espace Noir)

        From August 8 to 12, 2012, thousands of anarchists from all over the world gathered at St. Imier, Switzerland, to celebrate the 140th anniversary of the St. Imier Congress at which the Anti-Authoritarian International was founded, which many believe to be the historical beginning of the anarchist movement. Among the fifteen delegates who attended the original meeting was Mikhail Bakunin, who also stayed in St. Imier for a little while. St. Imier is a small town of less than 5000 inhabitants. The anarchist space Espace Noir, which has been going since the 1980s, can be found on the main road in the middle of town. It hosts a restaurant, bar, infoshop, cinema and concert venue, as well as a gallery. Walking around town, one can see several plaques discussing the anarchist history of St. Imier, some complete with pictures of Bakunin and Kropotkin. It certainly is a very special place and it was already so 140 years ago when the Jura Foundation, made up of watchmakers (highly skilled artisans), had its stronghold there.

        The gathering of 2012 is said to have been the biggest anarchist gathering in 20 years. Anarchists from all over the world attended, including some from as far away as Japan, South Africa, South and North America and, of course, from all over Europe. 

Read the full article HERE:

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"ANARCHY", IN COMMON PARLANCE, CHAOS, VIOLENT DISORDER!!

        I have always maintained that if you ask 100 people what the meaning of anarchy is, you'll get 100 different answers. Most will be wrong and will be answers like chaos and disorder, and will be based on ignorance of all things anarchistic. The establishment, state, mainstream media are all involved in perpetuating that line of thought, probably because they see anarchism as their greatest threat.

This from The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest:

In common parlance “anarchy” refers to a state of chaos or violent disorder and “anarchism” to the rebellious or merely perverse pursuit of this state. Indeed, the word “anarchist” was first used in the seventeenth century as an epithet against the defeated Levellers in the English Civil War. While the ideas and practices that would become known as anarchism were distinctly foreshadowed by movements such as the Diggers and the Ranters in the seventeenth century as well as by eighteenth-century thinkers such as William Godwin (and arguably by far more ancient schools of thought, from the Cynics of the fifth century bce to the Taoists of a century later), it was not until Pierre-Joseph Proudhon turned this epithet into a positive self-description that we can speak of anarchism per se, as a historical entity. Historically speaking, however, anarchism is the name for a movement, originating in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, characterized by its vision of a society of generalized self-management, its opposition to all forms of hierarchy and domination, and its particular emphasis on means of transformative action that prefigure the desired ends. The word also serves to name the goal of the movement – substantive and universal freedom, sometimes called “anarchy” – elements of which may be found in every society that has ever existed, particularly among peoples living without private property and the state.

Principles and Practices

Popular misunderstandings concerning anarchism, fed by more than a century and a half of sensationalistic media representations, are widespread – and, unfortunately, many scholarly accounts of anarchism do little to correct these distortions. The association of anarchy with chaos and senseless violence, while owing something to a certain phase in anarchist history (that of “propaganda by the deed”), is readily dispelled by even a cursory reading of works by actual self-described anarchists: “Anarchism … is not bombs, disorder, or chaos,” writes Alexander Berkman (1870–1936). “It is not a war of each against all. It is not a return to barbarism … Anarchism is the very opposite of all that” (Berkman 2003: xv). Similarly, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) defines anarchism as “the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary” (1910: 56). The entry on anarchism that Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) wrote for the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica defined it as “a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government” (2002: 284). These three explanations of anarchism – it would be difficult to find any more widely accepted by anarchists – show that anarchism is a form of social order rather than mere disorder or absence of organization; the form of social order anarchism represents is intended to maximize freedom, and to do so without recourse to the kinds of coercive institutions that are typically assumed to be necessary, variously called “government,” “law,” or “authority”; and in place of these institutions, anarchists propose to produce social order through a system of “free agreements” to meet individuals' “needs.”

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