Liberation.

 

        We live in hard times, poverty is increasing, more and more children go hungry, food banks are multiplying, destitution multiples, basic food is galloping out of reach of many, but hard times should be fertile soil for anarchists. It is so much easier to point to the anomalies and inequality of the system and should be obvious to most people. However, that is not always enough to rouse the people to anger and direct action. So what should anarchists do, perhaps Errico Malatesta points us in the right direction.

Quote from Great Anarchists by Dog Section Press, chapter on Malatesta.       

        "The important thing is not the victory of our plans, our projects, our utopias, which in any case need the confirmation of experience and can be --- developed and adapted to the real moral and material conditions of the age and place. What matters most is that the people--- lose their sheeplike instincts and habits which thousands of years of slavery have instilled in them, and learn to think and act freely. And it is to this great work of moral liberation that the anarchist must specifically dedicate themselves."

 No mean task but sounds like excellent advice.

                                                     Image courtesy of Libcom.

 

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Paper.

          I have often spouted about getting our message on the streets, and the need for greater leaflets, pamphlets, poster to proliferate on the streets and workplaces. They are our broadcasting system, our quiet teacher spreading our ideas and hopes. The anarchist movement owes a lot to those back allay, back shop, underground and open printing places. those dedicated individuals who spent hours printing and distributing our message, our hopes, our ideas. The printed word is as valuable as the meetings, street demonstrations and protests etc.. The printed word can quietly find its way into homes, workplaces and communities. It is difficult to imagine where we would be without those little presses churning out leaflets, periodicals, posters and pamphlets.
           So I am delighted that someone has brought together a history of those printing presses and the important part they played in getting those anarchists, ideas, hopes and visions to an ever increasing public. I for one will be ordering the book when it comes out.

 

London's anarchist HQ, 127 Ossulston Street, 1894-1927

Image courtesy of Libcom.

Article taken from Anarchist News.

From University of Hawai'i News

            Anarchist letterpress printers and presses from the late 1800s through the 1940s is the focus of a new book by a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Political Science and Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty member.
          Professor Kathy Ferguson’s work Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture, details the importance of printed materials that galvanized anarchist movements across the U.S. and Great Britain. The book will be released on February 24, and is published by Duke University Press.
          Anarchism is a political movement that is skeptical of all justifications for authority and holds all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary. Ferguson shows how printers arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers and blank space within the design of a page. Their extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and publishing their radical ideas brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. By diving deeper into the practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.

 

Professor Kathy Ferguson.

               “The anarchists organized a remarkable political movement largely through their print culture: writing, printing, distributing, reading, and archiving their publications brought them together. Their success suggests that the act of making things together generates political energy,” Ferguson said.
              Ferguson is the author of several books, including Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets, which is about a central figure in the anarchist movement. She is working on another book on women in the anarchist movement whose contributions have been underrated or lost. Ferguson’s goal when writing these two books is to bring women more fully into anarchism, and at the same time to bring anarchism more fully into feminism. She hopes to bring these radical histories to light to make our understanding of them more robust so that we can use them better today.
            The Department of Political Science and Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are housed in the Mānoa College of Social Sciences.

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1940's Glasgow.

        For those youngster, and not so young, interested in the history of Glasgow's anarchism, you could do well to have a wee read of the Charlie Baird Snr.'s interview on libcom. Part WW2 period experience and part post war. My one little criticism of the interview is no mention of Willie McDougal, a very active Glasgow anarchist, who published several papers, spent time in prison as a conscientious objector, and kept the Workers Open Forum running when others had moved on, and very little on Guy Aldred, a very active and well known anarchist in Glasgow. It would be interesting to hear what people think of where we are now in Glasgow. Have we grown, shrunk, on track, lost our way, are we grasping the opportunities the way we should, have we lost the streets in favour of the internet?

 Willie McDougal.

Anarchism, in 1940's Glasgow:

1) Charlie Baird Sr. : An Interview

6th June 1977

Before the war I’d been sympathetic to the Communist Party, as early as 16 or 17 years of age. It wasn’t until the war, when Russia had signed the pact with Hitler, that I started to have my doubts about the CP. But even prior to that I’d drifted away from them. When the war started, I took up the Conscientious Objector position, and finished up, of course, in jail. It was in jail - I hadn’t been conscious that there was such a movement as the libertarian movement, the anarchist movement - I thought that the CP was the last thing in left-wing movements.

I met two lads in prison (I also knew one prior to going in, who’d told me to look out for these two lads) ; one was Jimmy Dick. He’d managed to get some anarchist literature in. I went through that and discovered that was what I’d been looking for. It was what I’d believed, even when I was in the CP ; I was dissatisfied with the centralised character of the movement.

Then, of course, when we came out, there was an anarchist movement in Glasgow at that particular time. We came out of jail and teamed up with them. It was around 1942 when I came out of jail,and there were about 40 active members of the group. By 1944-45 it was probably around 70-80 members.

The peculiar thing about the Glasgow group was that there was no such thing as recognised members of the group. The only way you could recognise a regular member of the group was by his activities ; there were no things like membership cards or anything like that. The 70 or 80 would include the lads from Burnbank and Hamilton - miners, the small groups out there with 3 or 4 members. They organised meetings and we supplied them with speakers.

Continue Reading HERE: 

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

Liz Willis.

    Another month, another "Read of the Month" from Spirit of Revolt. For this  month, to mark International Women’s Day, Spirit of Revolt’s “Read of the Month” for March, is an article by Liz Willis, held in our John Cooper Collection, No. 3-52-1. It is a Solidarity Pamphlet No. 48. “Women in the Spanish Revolution” . Liz hailed from Stornoway, and was active in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and London as well as active against nuclear weapons at the Faslane nuclear submarine base. She died in 2019 from pancreatic cancer aged 72, . There is a very informative article on Liz Willis HERE.

You can read her pamphlet on line, courtesy of Libcom. 

Women in the Spanish Revolution. 

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

Hope Or Now??

      Some years ago I read "The Coming Insurrection" by The Invisible Committee, and found it extremely interesting and informative, an excellent read. Since then I have plucked quotes from them every so often. I am now reading "Now" another of their renderings and again I find it fascinating. It is available as a free download from Libcom Library.
       The following is an extract from the first chapter, "Tomorrow Is Cancelled", I wonder if it resonates with you as it does with me? 

 

 

--------Hope. Now there's at least one disease this civilization has not infected us with. We're not despairing for all that. No one has ever acted out of hope. Hope is of a piece with waiting, with the refusal to see what is there, with the fear of breaking into the present-in short, with the fear of living. To hope is to declare one­self in advance to be without any hold on that from which something is expected nonetheless. It's to remove oneself from the process so as to avoid any connection with its outcome. It's wanting things to be different without embracing the means for this to come about. It's a kind of cowardice. One has to know what to commit to and then commit to it. Even if it means making enemies. Or making friends. Once we know what we want, we're no longer alone, the world repopulates. Everywhere there are allies, closenesses, and an infinite gradation of possible friendships. Nothing is close for someone who floats. Hope, that very slight but constant impetus toward tomorrow that is communicated to us day by day, is the best agent of the maintenance of order. We're daily informed of problems we can do nothing about, but to which there will surely be solutions tomor­row. The whole oppressive feeling of powerlessness that this social organization cultivates in everyone is only an immense pedagogy of waiting. It's an avoidance of now. But there isn't, there's never been, and there never will be anything but now. And even if the past can act upon the now, this is because it has itself never been anything but a now. Just as our tomorrow will be. The only way to understand something in the past is to under­stand that it too used to be a now. It's to feel the faint breath of the air in which the human beings of yesterday lived their lives. If we are so much inclined to flee from now, it's because now is the time of decision. It's the locus of the "I accept" or the "I refuse," of ''I'll pass on that" or ''I'll go with that." It's the locus of the logical act that imme­diately follows the perception. It is the present, and hence the locus of presence. It is the moment, endlessly renewed, of the taking of sides. Thinking in distant terms is always more comfortable. "In the end," things will change; "in the end," beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let's go on this way, let's remain what we are. A mind that thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It doesn't seek transformation; it avoids it. The current disaster is like a monstrous accumu­lation of all the deferrals of the past, to which are added those of each day and each moment, in a continuous time slide. But life is always decided now, and now, and now.------

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Rebellious Working Class Ended WW1.

        When it comes to WW1, most people in UK think it ended in victory for the "allies", the word "armistice" doesn't seem to register. What really brought an end to that particular imperialist bloodbath, was the collapse of discipline. Mutiny and rebellion were breaking out everywhere, troops had had enough, orders were ignored, officers were ridiculed, and the various states were anxious as to their survival. It was a class thing that finally put a nail in that particular psychopathic imperialist endeavour. 

       The following is an excellent article on libcom, posted by Jared, well worth reading in full, as we head into the hypocritical pomp and ceremony of establishment's charade of caring, that will be on display in the next few days. That babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media, will wallpaper our lives with banal, patriotic jingoism and empty rhetoric, which we are supposed to swallow. Those who engineer and benefit from wars, will take the stand with bowed heads, who knows, perhaps thinking of the next great plunder and how they can get away with it all.

       I make no excuse for posting this in full, it should be writ large in the minds of this generation, as we stand looking at bloody war after bloody war, with the high possibility of even more devastating conflicts looming.

Some images of WW1 mutinies.

From libcom:

The untold history of armistice 

and the end of World War I
         ‘The best antidote to ideology is detail,’ writes Paul Mason. And the detail that’s missing this Armistice Day is that working people, when they take power into their own hands, can end whatever catastrophe is imposed on them.
        In 1918, after four years of slaughter, deprivation and hardship, the Central Powers of Austro-Hungary and Germany were rocked by strikes and mutinies. In February, a naval mutiny broke out at Kotor and sailors shot their officers; by October, the Austro-Hungarian army had collapsed from mass desertions and political upheaval. Soon afterwards a mutiny by German sailors at Kiel merged with other uprisings and quickly escalated into a full-scale rebellion against the imperial state, sparking the abdication of the German Kaiser and the proclamation of a workers’ republic on 9 November 1918.
       Preferring peace to full-scale revolution, an armistice with the Allied powers was signed two days later, on 11 November 1918. Working-class revolt had helped to end the First World War.
      Not that you’d know this from New Zealand’s centennial commemoration of armistice Day, Armistice 100. People across the country will take part in a number of sanitised official events, from joining the ‘roaring chorus’ to texting the Armistice Beacon. They’re unlikely to learn much about the strikes, mutinies and resistance from below that toppled both generals and governments.
      I’ve searched the program resources in vain for any reference to how and why armistice came about. Among messages of peace and the standard script of sacrifice and loss, there is a notable silence when it comes to the masses of working men and women who contributed to the war’s end. Instead, peace seems to fall upon the war like a happy sun-shower. The surrenders of the various Central Powers seem to just … happen.
       Why is there such a gap in the historical narrative? Surely it is not for lack of time or information. We’ve had four years of commemoration and some big spends to go with them (although not as much as Australia, whose $1.1bn dwarfs the $31m spent in New Zealand). It’s not as if the date crept up on us.
      Perhaps I’m being far too critical of the Armistice 100 program and the small pool of public historians working on WW100-related events. After all, I’ve been one of them, although if I’m honest, the feature on censorship and its marginal references to dissent during the First World War was possibly too little, too late.
      It would be wrong to see this glaring omission as some devilish scheme designed to serve the interests of capital and the state. There’s no conspiracy at play here. Instead, official historians are often hamstrung by codes of conduct and the mythical stance of neutrality, or by what is or isn’t palatable to their managers and their manager’s managers. Histories of social revolution, radical ideas, and the agency of everyday, working-class people are hardly the thing of monthly reports or ministerial press releases. And despite the big-ticket items of commemoration, the long, hard slog of quality, in-depth research is like the work of any modern workplace – of trying to do more with less.
       Perhaps, too, there’s something in the turn away from class as a framework of analysis – that is, if class was ever a frame of analysis in the first place (we have, after all, had numerous historians tell us that New Zealand was a classless society, free of a bourgeoisie and proletariat). As Paul Mason notes, ‘the termination of war by working-class action fits uneasily at a deeper level: for most of history the existence of a workforce with its own consciousness and organisations is an afterthought, or an anomaly.’ Instead of exploring the final months of the war through the experience of class or capitalist social relations, we have instead been fed a discourse that historian Charlotte Macdonald believes ‘has come to be strongly characterised by rather too neatly drawn themes of consensual patriotism, duty and sacrifice.’
      Yet if we centre class, and class conflict, in our reading of armistice, the history it reveals is somewhat different to the official account on offer.
       A few examples will suffice. On 16 October 1918, 14 men of the 1 New Zealand (Divisional) Employment Company were charged with mutiny after ‘combining together not to work in the NZ DIV laundry when it was their duty to do so.’ The men, most of whom were labourers, were all sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour for their collective work-refusal. That their sentences were later remitted does not negate their struggle.
       Three days after armistice, on 14 November 1918, a riotous throng of men from the New Zealand Division gathered in the town square of Beauvois, France. Monty Ingram, a bank clerk from Whakatāne, recorded the event in his diary. ‘A great gathering of troops were harangued by a chap in the Dinks, who, standing on a box in true labour agitator style’ called on the military authorities to send them home. After a Padre was physically prevented from speaking and a staff officer was howled into silence, the men, now in their thousands, marched on Division Headquarters ‘and swarmed over the place like bees around a honeycomb.’ When Major General Andrew Russell finally appeared in the doorway, he was ‘badly heckled by all sorts of interjections thrown at him and by being called all the b-b-b’s under the sun.’ Russell’s speech fell on deaf ears. Instead, the crowd ordered their general to get in touch with the War Office and cancel any orders sending them to Germany. According to Christopher Pugsley, appeals to the honour of the Division and the threat of dire punishment prevented further action. Still, Russell recorded in his diary: ‘must watch for Bolshevism.’
      This temporary levelling of rank was triggered by frustrations about demobilisation, but class was ever present. As Dave Lamb notes, the widespread mutinies across the Allied forces broke out too soon after armistice for delay in demobilisation to be the sole cause. ‘Antagonism towards officers, hatred of arbitrary discipline, and a revolt against bad conditions and uncertainty about the prospect of being sent to Russia all combined with the delay, confusion and uncertainty about demobilisation.’
        Observed William Wilson, a farmer: ‘Codford [Camp] the last few weeks has been unbearable, discipline has gone to the pack and the troops don’t care a damn for officers and NCOs.’ Strikes by British dockers and seamen caused further delays, and further examples of direct action. There was conflict in Bulford and Sling camps, where New Zealand troops were charged with ‘endeavouring to persuade persons to mutiny’ and sentenced to hard labour. And on the transport ships home, unpopular officers found themselves victim to collective justice. In these moments, when the soldiers took power into their own hands, the generals were powerless to act.
       Back in New Zealand, the sudden end to the war, coupled with the influenza pandemic, also tested the home front military command and their ability to enforce discipline. Two weeks after armistice, the Chief of General Staff, Colonel Charles Gibbon, found himself rushing to Featherston Military Camp, where the troops were mutinous. 5000 men had staged a ‘violent’ demonstration in front of camp headquarters and presented a list of demands to the commandant. Gibbon and Defence Minister James Allen endured a stormy confrontation with the men’s delegates. In the face of mass protest, Gibbon and Allen gave in to some of the soldiers’ demands around demobilisation. By December, the recruits were marching out of Featherston at the rapid rate of 500 a day.
      The militant self-activity of working people – whether they were soldiers, industrial workers, or both – was a deeply entrenched concern for the New Zealand government. The upheavals of 1918, home and abroad, fed into a developing ‘red scare’. By 1919, red scare rhetoric came to dominate the public sphere. Prime Minister William Massey urged his Reform Party faithful to ‘secure good men to stem the tide of Anarchy and Bolshevism’. Allen believed ‘there was so much lawlessness in the country that the only thing that could save [it] from going to damnation was the drill sergeant.’
      Wartime regulations were extended into peacetime. The power to deport undesirables was legislated in 1919. Distributing revolutionary books or pamphlets remained seditious. And now that soldiers trained in killing had returned to their jobs and their pay disputes, firearm acts were passed allowing the state to clamp down on whole working-class neighbourhoods.
     Fear of working-class resistance strengthened the apparatus of state surveillance. Meetings of radicals were secretly attended by police and fortnightly reports were sent to Police Headquarters. Detectives in each district systemised this work by compiling an index of individuals who had ‘extreme revolutionary socialistic or IWW ideas’. This signaled the formation of New Zealand’s first ‘Special’ Branch and laid the groundwork for all future spy agencies in New Zealand. The unrest unleashed in the final months of the war directly influenced the monitoring of dissent in New Zealand for years to come.
       This is a small taste of the untold history of armistice and the end of the First World War. Instead of learning about it, the turbulent events leading up to and after armistice are turned into joyous celebration. Cloaked in the language of peace, Armistice Day becomes an official exercise in justifying the insane loss of life.
      We might even be tempted to see Armistice 100 as an example of what Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen calls the ‘industrialisation of memory’. In his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Nguyen also examines the ‘memory industry’ – the museums we take our children to visit, the sculptured grounds of Pukeahu National War Memorial, the Armistice Day parades at sunset. For Nguyen, at the root of this industry is the industrialisation of memory.
Quote:
      Industrialising memory proceeds in parallel with how warfare is industrialised as part and parcel of capitalist society, where the actual firepower exercised in a war is matched by the firepower of memory that defines and refines that war’s identity.
        In other words, memory and the memory industry are weaponised. And while the memory industry produces kitsch, sentimentality, and spectacle, the industrialisation of memory ‘exploits memory as a strategic resource’.
        It is how bodies are produced for current and future wars.

        ‘The best antidote to ideology is detail,’ writes Paul Mason. And the detail that’s missing this Armistice Day is that working people, when they take power into their own hands, can end whatever catastrophe is imposed on them.
        First published by Overland Literary Journal. Jared Davidson is a labour historian and archivist based in Wellington, New Zealand. His forthcoming book, Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 is out March 2019

Posted By Jared
Nov 10 2018 04:20

 

Workers Remember Your History, Ricardo Flores Magon.

  Farewell

We cannot break our chains with weak desire,

With whines and supplicating cries.

'Tis not by crawling meekly to the mire

The free-winged eagle learns to mount the skies.

The gladiator, victor in the fight,

On who the hard-contested laurels fall,

Goes not into the arena pale with fright

But steps forth fearless, defying all.

O victory, O victory, dear and fair,

Thou crownest him who does his best,

Who perishing, still unafraid to bear,

Goes down to dust, thy image in his breast.

Farewell, O comrades, I scorn life as a slave!

I begged no tyrant for my life, though sweet it was;

Though chained, I go unconquered to my grave,

Dying for my own birthright- - - -and the world's.

Ricardo Flores Magon.

      

       Written just before his death while incarcerated in the Federal prison, Leavenworth, Kansas. At the behest of the Mexican Government, the US Government seized him, its agents fiercely beat him and held him for years until his death.       

        In anarchism, we are very fortunate, we have a rich well of activists that we can be rightly proud of and can take inspiration from, individuals who filled our history with ideas and ideals. There is a valiant history we can delve into and come up richer in ideas and stronger in our principles. Thanks to those tireless people who dedicated their lives trying to create that better world for all, we have a path, and are not walking blind.

      We should always remember them and record their lives. The following is taken from Libcom, one of the many individuals, from whom we should take inspiration, Ricardo Flores Magon.

 

      A short biography of Ricardo Flores Magon, the Mexican anarchist who took part in the Mexican revolution and was imprisoned several times throughout his life.

Written by Alan MacSimóin
Edited by libcom 

 Ricardo Flores Magon
Born 1879 - Mexico, died November 22nd 1922 - Kansas, USA
       Inside modern Mexico the name of Ricardo Flores Magon is well known. But outside Mexico few have heard of him. Born to a poor family in 1873, he became a journalist on the opposition paper 'El Demócrata' after finishing school. In 1900, along with his brother Jesús, he founded "Regeneración', a radical paper opposed to the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.
      After release from a second prison sentence arising from his campaigning journalism, he moved across the border to the USA. Despite continual persecution and imprisonment by the U.S. authorities, at the instigation of the Mexican dictatorship - who had put a price of $20,000 on his head after he wouldn't be bought off with the offer of a place in the government. He would not be silenced.
     In 1905, Magon founded the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM), a reformist organisation opposed to the excesses of the regime, which organised two unsuccessful uprisings against Diaz in 1906 and 1908. During his early years of exile he became acquainted with the legendary anarchist Emma Goldman, and it was partly through her that he moved from reformism to become an anarchist.
      With the outbreak of the revolution of 1910, the revolution that he and the PLM more than any other group or person, had paved the way for, Magon devoted the rest of his life to the anarchist cause. Through the influence of his ideas, large areas of land were expropriated by the peasants and worked in common by them under the banner of 'Land and Liberty', the motto of the PLM. This motto was later adopted by Emiliano Zapata, whose legacy inspires the EZLN rebels of the 1994 Southern Mexican uprising whose struggle continues today.
       As the revolution began on November 20th 1910, Magon summed up the aims of PLM: 

"The Liberal Party works for the welfare of the poor classes of the Mexican people. It does not impose a candidate (in the presidential election), because it will be up to the will of the people to settle the question. Do the people want a master? Well let them elect one. All the Liberal Party desires is to effect a change in the mind of the toiling people so that every man and woman should know that no one has the right to exploit anybody."

      A fortnight later he explained the difference between the PLM and other opposition movements: 

        "Governments have to protect the right of property above all other rights. Do not expect then, that Madero will attack the right of property in favour of the working class. Open your eyes. Remember a phrase, simple and true and as truth indestructible, the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves".

        By January, PLM forces were fighting in six of Mexico's states. Major towns, as well as rural areas, were liberated by anarchists. In March a peasant army led by Zapata, and influenced by the Magonistas of the PLM, rose up in Morelos. By now the nationalist opposition of Madero had turned some of its guns away from the troops of Diaz and begun to attack the anarchists of the PLM.
     In April, the PLM issued a manifesto to "the members of the party, to the anarchists of the world and the workers in general". Vast quantities were produced in Spanish and English to explain their attitude to the revolution:

      "The Mexican Liberal Party is not fighting to destroy the dictator Porfirio Diaz in order to put in his place a new tyrant. The PLM is taking part in the actual insurrection with the deliberate and firm purpose of expropriating the land and the means of production and handing them over to the people, that is, each and every one of the inhabitants of Mexico without distinction of sex. This act we consider essential to open the gates for the effective emancipation of the Mexican people."

       In massively illiterate Mexico, where many villages had only a handful of people able to read, the circulation of "Regeneración" had reached 27,000 a week. When Tijuana was liberated in May, most of Baja California came under PLM influence. They issued a manifesto "Take possession of the land...make a free and happy life without masters or tyrants".
      That month saw Madero sign a peace treaty with Diaz and take over as President of Mexico. Military attacks on the PLM increased, and towns were retaken by government troops. Prisoners were murdered by the new regime, sometimes after being made to dig their own graves. At a meeting in Los Angeles, Magon was asked to accept the treaty but replied "...until the land was distributed to the peasants and the instruments of production were in the hands of the workers, the liberals would never lay down their arms".
       Along with many leading PLM organisers, Magon was arrested (again) by the US authorities. The rebels were slandered as "bandits" and repression in both Mexico and the US reached new heights. Despite the setbacks caused by their relatively small size in a gigantic country, the attacks they suffered from the armies of two countries, and the terrible revenge exacted by the rich and their agents, new uprisings broke out in Senora, Durango and Coahuila.
      Such was the support for their ideas, that even the conservative British TUC felt obliged to invite Honore Jaxon, Treasurer and European representative of the PLM, to address their 1911 conference. One solidarity action especially worth mentioning was the 24-hour strike by two army units in Portugal protesting against the arrest of PLM militants by the US government.
         A new manifesto, emphasising their anarchism, was issued in September:

       "The same effort and the same sacrifices that are required to raise to power a governor - that is to say a tyrant - will achieve the expropriation of the fortunes the rich keep from you. It is for you, then, to choose. Either a new governor - that is to say a new yoke - or life redeeming expropriation and the abolition of all imposition, religious, political or any other kind".

       PLM and Zapatista rebellions continued until 1919, but their numbers and inadequate arms were not sufficient to defeat the state forces. However all was not in vain. In 1922 the anarchist CGT trade union was founded in Mexico city, and today the rebellion in the state of Chiapas can be seen as, partly at least, a continuation of Magon's struggle.
       During the years of struggle Magon opposed and fought successive so-called "revolutionary regimes," resisting both the old and new dictatorships with equal vigour. Imprisoned by the U.S. authorities in 1905, 1907, and 1912 he was finally sentenced to 20 years under the espionage laws in 1918. He died, apparently after suffering beatings, in Leavenworth Prison, Kansas, on November 22, 1922.
      When his body was brought back across the border, every town where the cortege stopped was decked out in the red and black flags of anarchism. In Mexico City, 10,000 working people escorted his body to Panteon Frances where it is buried. A flame had been lit that will not burn out until liberty becomes a living reality.

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

Universal Credits And The Cull Of The Poor.

        An excellent article by Libcom, on "Universal Credits", is well worth reading in full. It charts the devious road of the state trying to appease the discontent that poverty nurtures, callously trying to keep the lid on things, while it gets on with the usual capitalist exploitation. 

        The official line is that universal credit is being introduced to make things easier, simpler, gather a multitude of payments together to benefit people generally. As if fine-tuning bourgeois bureaucracy is a matter for anyone apart from itself and those it serves. The reality for those on the receiving-end is catastrophic to say the least.
       Right from the start the scheme as a whole failed its own timetable time after time. For anyone relying on state benefits, especially new claimants, the system has become increasingly erratic, unfathomable and more and more subject to the arbitrary whims of individual bureaucrats. A sociologist might tell us that the delivery of a service, its timeliness and serviceability, are less important than the self-aggrandising machinations of bureaucrats and ministers and their staffs. Of more significance to us, however, is what it tells us about the state of capitalism in the so-called advanced world today.
       Despite its name, the universal credit project runs completely against the professed ideal of the post-war welfare state: that a wage worker who becomes unemployed should be compensated with an income adequate for subsistence as a right, i.e. without means testing. Even if the 1946 National Insurance Act didn’t exactly see things in terms of basic human rights – it was conceived as an insurance scheme run by the state where the pay-outs would come from a fund based on the sizeable fraction deducted from workers’ wage packets. Anyone who had been earning a wage [well, at any rate adult males and single women] was entitled to ‘the dole’ simply by registering as unemployed. (Though this in itself was not always without stigma and unconditional payments for “interruption of earnings” did not last beyond six months or a year.) This is not a small point. The end of means testing was a key part of the post-war vision of Britain outlined in Beveridge’s famous 1942 report which gave the state responsibility for eliminating the five giant evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The Beveridge Report was not just discussed by bureaucrats in some obscure parliamentary committee. Thousands of copies and summaries of it were published and widely distributed to reach a working class audience – including amongst serving soldiers and sailors. Hence the prospect of a benign welfare state capitalism in place of mass unemployment, poverty and the workhouse, became a key part of government propaganda to keep the working class committed to “the war effort”.
       And so what Margaret Thatcher later called “the nanny state” came about, though it never fully matched Beveridge’s paternalistic vision. It didn’t last of course. But the reason is economic. The heyday of state-funded provision for the welfare of all citizens coincides with the period of post-war reconstruction and boom. The return of capitalism’s inbuilt structural crisis at the beginning of the 1970s undermined Keynesian economic theory and the state welfare policies that went with it. On the employment front, a more or less manageable situation of “full employment” (defined as a situation with no more than 2-3% of the work force unemployed) quickly gave way to mass unemployment on a par with the 1920s as industry after industry was restructured, dismantled and production ‘outsourced’ to cheap-labour economies in the rest of the world. This, coupled with rampant inflation [over 25% by the mid-1970s] which quickly undermined the value of unemployment benefit, put an end to any idea that national insurance could cover the cost of maintaining the unemployed, especially as many workers faced long term unemployment and could hardly be considered as ‘between jobs’. To this day, despite all the fiddling with official figures and measures to disguise it, unemployment and under-employment are intrinsic to the UK economy as in all the capitalist heartlands, as the table Unemployment and Insecurity in the UK Labour Market from the Centre for Social Investigation, Nuffield College, Oxford at the top of this article shows.
         The old ‘family wage’ is long gone. Minimum wage or not, for decades now the take-home pay of a growing portion of the workforce has not been enough to live on without some form of additional state ‘benefits’. Today more people in a job than without a job are officially classified as ‘poor’. Together they make up well over a sixth of the workforce. (5.8 million out of a work-age population of 38 million people.) For decades too the state has been trying to disguise and manage the situation. Not always successfully. In 2011 riots of the dispossessed in various London districts echoed events in Toxteth and Brixton of thirty years earlier. No government dare withdraw the state support cushion altogether but nowadays nobody who loses their job is entitled to income adequate to live as a right, no matter how much national insurance they have paid. Instead a sophisticated form of means testing and monitoring by state agencies of people’s personal circumstances has become the norm.
        The whole panoply of benefits, allowances, credits claimable/available to individuals and/or families on low pay, to ‘jobseekers’, invalids, disabled … at the discretion of a state bureaucrat … has mushroomed out of the National Assistance scheme that was originally set up in 1948. Basically this was a bureaucratic afterthought to cater for a minority of people with “abnormal needs” not covered by national insurance. Anyone with an ‘abnormal need’ would have to undergo a means test. In 1966 National Assistance morphed into Supplementary Benefits. In 1988 Supplementary Benefits became Income Support. Since the introduction of ‘austerity’ following the financial crash a decade ago, the various Tory-led governments have been working on the introduction of Universal Credit.

Read the full article HERE:

It closes with the statement:

         All of this needs to be set against the continuing capitalist crisis. Capital always has to find ways to ease its own pains even if it causes misery and more to the working class. All of these measures have been a way to impose new rules on those with little. The British capitalist class and its uncivil servants have placed a new name at the head of a new set of rules designed to force people into a situation where it “pays” to work longer hours for less – the capitalist ideal! The Tories have been shown on a regular basis to be incompetent, callous, unprepared and heartless. Well, nothing new there! But the solution for the working class is not the very same system managed by pious Labour technocrats – there is no comfort zone – the solution lies in recognising that we have to get rid of capitalism, wage labour and its corollary, unemployment altogether.

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

Death At The Hands Of The Police.

          I suppose there are some naive people out there who still believe that the police are there to protect us from "bad guys", to make sure you don't steal something from your neighbour, or become drunk and disorderly. This is the wonderful illusion created by the propaganda spewed out from our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media. Make no mistake, the police are there to protect the established order of power and wealth, the main line of defence before the army takes to the streets, if need be. Yes they lock up the odd abuser, and rapist, but this is a spin-off not their main purpose. Killings by law enforcement officers in the UK from 1920 to 2000 is listed as 27, but that number rockets after the year 2000, from 2000 to March 2017 there are listed 42 such deaths. They act with impunity, and literally, "get away with murder".
       We now have another killing by those who pose as the protectors of the public, to add to those horrifying statistics, this report from Libcom, the details speak for themselves.

 

 

         Twenty five year old Edir Frederico Da Costa, known as Edson, died yesterday having sustained multiple injuries during a police stop in Beckton, East London. Update 23rd June - there will be a #JusticeForEdson demonstration this Sunday at Forest Gate station at 2pm.
       [content note: police violence, description of injuries]
        Edson was one of three people in a vehicle stopped by police in Beckton around 10pm on June 16th. Police used force to arrest him and pepper sprayed him at the scene, he had a heart attack and was pronounced dead. Edson was revived by paramedics on scene who put him into an induced coma, but he was brain dead. After being kept on life support, this was turned off Tuesday.
       The Newham Recorder reported that a post mortem has concluded there were no injuries to suggest severe force was used on Edson.
       In a statement on Facebook however, a family member wrote that his injuries included a fractured skull, fallen voice box and ruptured bladder amongst other injuries.
        A friend of the family on twitter mentioned that Edson's vertebrae had been snapped, and that while he was foaming at the mouth police had said he was 'OK'.
       Family have not been told the name of the officer involved. The case has parallels to the police killing of Freddie Gray in a police van in Baltimore in 2015, leading to mass protests over his death. Prosecutions of the officers involved in Freddie Gray's death did not result in convictions.
       Julian Cole was left in a vegetative state after being carried to a police car in Bedford in 2013. The CPS announced it would not be charging the police involved in Julian Cole's arrest earlier this year.
        Police brutality is a regular occurrence in the UK as well as in the US. The IPCC and CPS rarely prosecute police officers and there has been no conviction for a death in custody since 1969. This requires mass protests and organisation in order to gain even basic accountability of the police, but in the end the only accountable police force may be no police force. Movements towards complete police abolition are gaining pace as the limits of reform become increasingly stark.

Let's Roar.

 

      The farce of pretend change, the general election, is over, but the people still want real change, and it will come, but from outside that edifice to corporate capitalism and British imperialism, The Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption. Those who want real change to this unjust, unequal, exploitative society, have to be that change, it will never come through delegating that desire for change to a bunch of overpaid, over privileged, political ballerinas.

 

A post election message from Libcom:

       Whatever the result of the general election, we need to be building a movement capable of creating a better world.

Whether it's to wrest reforms from a minority Labour government, or defend ourselves against the onslaught of an increased majority for Theresa May, politics happens in our everyday lives through the wage relationship at work and the state outside it. Organising in our workplaces and communities is essential to building a movement that can transform society, regardless of the electoral cycle.
There are groups already doing that in the UK, right now. Local solidarity groups, national campaigns, radical media and archival projects, anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary unions all exist and welcome new members and volunteers.
We list some of these below, pick one and figure out how to join or support them.

     Libcom's list HERE so why not, if you haven't already, seek out a local group and become part of that change. Libcom's list is not the definitive list, I'm sure that if you look and ask around you'll find one you feel you can slot into, and change that whisper to a roar.

Let's Roar.

The problem's to big

The perpetrators unknown

you can't beat the system

all on your own.

So it's easy to withdraw

find your own little cage

turn a blind eye to the suffering

stifle your rage,

but the greed goes on

the poverty's still there,

you can't just leave it

for your children to bear.

Others feel as you do

eager to put things right

but lock in isolation

it's a hopeless fight,

so don't sit in silence

behind a closed door,

your voice can help raise

a whisper to a roar. 

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

Ignore Their Poisonous Patriotism.

        I think everybody agrees that the world we live in has changed dramatically over the last ten years or so. What seemed stable now looks unstable, systems that were said, would bring peace and prosperity to everybody, are now showing their inherent flaws, and divisions are widening. The populace are aware of the glaring inequality that has rapidly widened, with the rich and powerful becoming richer and more powerful, while they the ordinary people slide further down the slippery slope to poverty and deprivation. The power mongers are worried that this awareness will lead to them losing control, and they are snarling at each other with greater viciousness and ferocity, smouldering wars are warming up, barriers are rising between the rich and powerful factions. Nationalism is their chosen weapon to rally the population to support them against the "evil and dangerous" other, to help them gain control and protect their own little empire. The system of globalisation is breaking down, and like a wounded beast, that is when it is at its most dangerous. The lines of old empires are being redrawn, the battle lines are being laid down, and the blood of our children will be expected to defend them, as of empires before. We must never again allow our children's blood to be the cement of their greed driven system of exploitation for wealth and power.

       We must see this world without borders, one world, one people, as the economic system that has dominated our lives starts to unravel, it must be seen as an opportunity to refocus, rethink the direction we want the new world to take. We must refuse to fall for their divisive strategies, ignore their nationalism and poisonous patriotism. Unity between all people is the only rational answer to our problems, we have nothing to gain by hating our neighbours. As the system of economic greed and and insanity crumbles, let's do what we can to hasten its final destruction by co-operation, unity and solidarity between all the ordinary people of this tiny planet.

      Wherever you look the “patriot” card is being played more often. Whether it is in the brash version of Trump’s “America First”, or the authoritarian menace of Erdogan and Putin, the game is essentially the same. The aim is to divert attention from the real crisis onto the “other”, the foreigner. The politics of prejudice have always been part of the capitalist game but now the situation is more desperate. Finding a scapegoat is a lot easier than solving the real economic problem.

Read the full article HERE:

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

America's Full Spectrum Domination.

          I have no doubt what so ever, that Trump will continue America's imperialist pedigree, the question is, just how brutally will he pursue that policy of American aggrandisement, just how savagely will he use its horrendous military power.        

       It didn't take America long to go from a colony to a coloniser. This fresh new nation born around 1783, in just over 100 years went from a British colony to a colonial power. Its first conquest was the brutal conquest of the Philippines in 1898-1902, the first time American troops fought on foreign soil. That seems to have turned its lords and masters in to colonial addicts, and set the pattern for this "fledgling" nation. From then until the present day, America has invade, occupied, propped up vile dictators, overthrown elected regimes to set up puppet regimes, all to the greater glory of America's wealthy elite. It would be difficult to find a country in Europe, Far East, Middle East, South America, that doesn't have a US military presence on its soil. American military personnel are based in more countries than any other nation on the planet. America is truly the world's  largest imperial power, ever. Anybody who sees America other than a powerful imperialist nation, is not looking at the truth history tells us.

        The main sources of information on these military installations (e.g. C. Johnson, the NATO Watch Committee, the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases) reveal that the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military bases Worldwide.
       In this regard, Hugh d’Andrade and Bob Wing’s 2002 Map 1 entitled “U.S. Military Troops and Bases around the World, The Cost of ‘Permanent War’”, confirms the presence of US military personnel in 156 countries.
       The US Military has bases in 63 countries. Brand new military bases have been built since September 11, 2001 in seven countries.
        In total, there are 255,065 US military personnel deployed Worldwide.
        These facilities include a total of 845,441 different buildings and equipments. The underlying land surface is of the order of 30 million acres. According to Gelman, who examined 2005 official Pentagon data, the US is thought to own a total of 737 bases in foreign lands. Adding to the bases inside U.S. territory, the total land area occupied by US military bases domestically within the US and internationally is of the order of 2,202,735 hectares, which makes the Pentagon one of the largest landowners worldwide (Gelman, J., 2007).

       No country in modern times has ever invaded more countries than America, its list of military interventions and occupations outstrips all others. Though never invaded, it has never been at peace, its invasions and intrusions into other countries are an ongoing litany of death, destruction and misery, a modern Dante's Inferno, for other nations and their people.

       The Global Policy Forum list more than 200 American military and clandestine operation in foreign countries from its birth up to 2004, since 2004, we are all well aware of America's military interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere. 

        This is the lie that the West, lead by America, is a force for peace and democracy, it is in fact, just another phase of brutal imperialism. The only thing new about this phase, is its world wide domination, and its unimaginable military destructive power. Until we all take up the struggle to get rid of the nation states, and take control of our own lives, we will have to live the lie, and live in the fear of Armageddon. 

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

Syrian Kurdistan.

        Donnacha DeLong, Circled A Radio, returns this week with a show about what's happening in Syrian Kurdistan, with an activist who has seen first hand the new society Kurds are trying to build in the midst of conflict. Features Tottenham's own Zaher Baher talking about what's going on in Rojava in Syria and why they need our solidarity. 

Listen Now:

From Libcom By Zaher Baher, from Haringey Solidarity Group and Kurdistan Anarchists Forum

Also a talk on the subject from last year's Anarchist Bookfair.

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