Mass Strike.

Photo courtesy of Al jazeera

          Still on going, the world's largest workers strike, over 200,000 farmers and farm workers have been on strike since November 26th., 2020. They have been camped out on the borders of the city of New Delhi demanding the withdrawal of the governments intend new legislation, opening up Indian agriculture to the free market. This of course will benefit nobody but the big agro-business and destroy all the small farmers in India, all for corporate profit.
        They have already won a small victory by getting the courts to delay the implementation of the new legislation until further notice. The farmers have stated they will not settle for less than the complete withdrawal of this legislation. Meanwhile the government has always stated that it would not back down with its plans to open up Indian agriculture to the corporate beasts of the free market.
        Now it appears that the government has perhaps blinked first, as they have stated they are willing to delay the implementation of the legislation for 18 months and hold discussions with the farmers. It is to be hoped that the striking workers realise that this is not the time to concede, as the delay could be a tactic to sap the strength of the strikers by dragging the affair out for another 18 months.
       To help the striking workers we should all show solidarity and support for their long drawn out struggle, three months out on strike so far is hardship, to hold out while the government for the next 18 months, pussyfoots around the discussion table with popcorn offers and bubblegum suggestions, with the intention of implementing the legislation as the workers resolve fades. All power to the workers' struggle, solidarity across borders.

More HERE: 

And HERE: 

And HERE: 

And HERE: 

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UK Torture.

       The state peddles the illusion that prisons are "correction centres", places where your "bad habits" will be corrected, and you will come out a model citizen. Of course to them your "bad habits" are words and deeds that could harm the powerful and privileged, and that "model citizen" they strive to create has to be a subservient citizen who accepts their place in the dung-heap of capitalism. However we all know or should know that prisons are state institutions of repression, hellholes of violence, overcrowding and arbitrary justice delivered on a whim of the staff.
      Our media does from time to time mention prisons where torture and inhumane brutality is prevalent, but it is usually in those far way places run by nasty foreigners, it would never happen here in free democratic UK, ha-ha-ha. So it is with a little surprise that I actually read of treatment tantamount to torture happening in Scottish prisons, though we already know it is happening across the country, it is encouraging to see it get the oxygen of publicity from our mainstream media.  

 

The following extract is from The Daily Record:

         An anti-torture watchdog has revealed fears about the use of segregation and excessive force in Scottish jails.
       A new report included allegations from a women with borderline personality disorder, who was left with a black eye after one incident and a suspected broken elbow in another.
      The Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT)’s report was based on visits to Shotts and Cornton Vale prisons.
      It highlighted 27 cases where force was used on women – aimed at keeping them safe – following incidents of self-harm or suicide attempts.
       It also describes the segregation of some women in HMP Cornton Vale as “akin to solitary confinement” and “verging on institutional neglect”, according to The Ferret website.
      The report said: “As neither woman wanted to exercise alone in the stark yards, the women were locked alone in their cells for 23.5 to 24 hours each day.
     “The women also ate alone in their cells, where their food was given to them through the door. The only regular inter-prisoner communication…was to shout through the walls to each other.”

       Considering that Cornton Vale Prison has the design capacity to hold a maximum of 119 inmates and the details from the following extract, that in itself is an indictment against the place and those responsible for its management.

This from Wikipedia:

         It has been criticised for overcrowding, with 340 inmates being held there in August 2004.[6] A high number of suicides have taken place there. Eleven women killed themselves while serving sentences at Cornton Vale between 1995 and 2002.[5] In 2010, Brigadier Hugh Munro (the Chief Inspector of Prisons for Scotland) declared the prison in a "state of crisis", citing overcrowding, two-hour waits for the toilet, cold meals, lack of activities and a deep problem of prisoner boredom which was impeding rehabilitation.[7]
       In 2006, 98% of the inmates had addiction issues; 80% had problems with mental health and 75% were survivors of abuse. It also holds children, in particular the babies of inmates who are imprisoned alongside their mothers and teenagers where there is no suitable accommodation available in young offenders institutions.
       In 2006 it was announced that the practice of "double cuffing" all inmates who are in labour to a custody officer until second stage labour and immediately re-handcuffed after giving birth, had ended.[8]
       A 2012 review into women's prisons in Scotland, conducted by former Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini described Cornton Vale as "a miserable place" and that conditions for prisoners were "antediluvian and appalling".[9][10]
        In 2019 women were found “who clearly were in need of urgent care and treatment in a psychiatric facility, and [who] should not have been in a prison environment”. Among them was one woman who bit through the skin and muscle of her arm down to the bone and another who set her hair on fire.[11]

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Viva l'anarchie!

       Emile Henry was Guillotined in Paris on 21st. May 1894. His last words were reputed to be "Courage, comarades! Vive l'anarchie!" (wikipedia) His crime, placing a bomb in a cafe in Paris.

       What drove Emily to carry out this act was his hatred and anger at the corruption, injustice and inequality that he saw all around him in society. All this existing behind an illusion and veneer of the opposite values. This hatred of what he saw and his desire for justice, equality and freedom drove him to desperate acts. Here we are 126 years on from his execution, if Emile could come back and view today's society, what would he think and what actions would he take?
       Today the injustice has been magnified a thousand fold across the globe, avoidable inequality has ran rampant and reached unimaginable levels, corruption is so blatant that it seems to be the accepted way of life. I fear dialogue and debate will never remedy this state of affairs.

Two quotes by Emile Henry from his trial:

       “I had been told that our social institutions were founded on justice and equality; I observed all around me nothing but lies and impostures… I brought with me into the struggle a profound hatred which every day was renewed by the spectacle of this society where everything is base, everything is equivocal, everything is ugly, where everything is an impediment to the outflow of human passions, to the generous impulses of the heart, to the free flight of thought”.

And:

      “You have hanged in Chicago, decapitated in Germany, garotted in Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and Paris, but what you will never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep. It is born in the heart of a society that is rotting and falling apart. It is a violent reaction against the established order. It represents all the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations that strike out against authority. It is everywhere, which makes it impossible to contain. It will end by killing you”.

Drawing by Phil May, 1894.

Remember Our Own, Colin Ward.

     We should always remember and honour our own, February 11th. 2010, anarchist Colin Ward died aged 85.

 From wikipedia

Colin Ward (14 August 1924 – 11 February 2010) was a British anarchist writer. He has been called "one of the greatest anarchist thinkers of the past half century, and a pioneering social historian."

     A respected voice in many fields and prolific writer and thinker a credit to the anarchist movement.

From Guardian Obituary: 

      Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, lived with the title of Britain's most famous anarchist for nearly half a ­century, bemused by this ambivalent soubriquet. In Anarchy in Action (1973), he set out his belief that an anarchist society was not an end goal. Following Alexander Herzen, the writer and thinker known as the "father of ­Russian socialism", Colin saw all distant goals as a form of tyranny and believed that anarchist principles could be ­discerned in everyday human relations and impulses. Within this perspective, politics was about strengthening ­co-operative ­relations and supporting human ingenuity in its myriad vernacular and everyday forms.

       One of Colin's favourite metaphors – adopted from a novel by Ignazio Silone – was the image of the seed beneath the snow, which suggested to him that anarchist principles were ever alive and prescient. He thought it was the work of politics to nurture such beliefs and to support them through small-scale initiatives, avoiding the temptation to replicate or scale them up to a level beyond which professional bureaucracies take over. He was fond of contrasting the vocabulary of self-organisation, with its friendly societies, mutuals, ­co-operatives and voluntary associations, with the nomenclature of the state and private sectors with their directorates, corporations, boards   and executives.

Some of Colin Ward's writings from Anarchist Library
This from Spacial Agency:

       Ward's writings are characterised by a combination of theoretical discussion on the nature of anarchism with a practical sensibility that looked for empirical results and solutions that could transform real-life situations and everyday living conditions. One of the key themes of his work was the promotion of cooperative self-help strategies, in the form of squatting, tenant cooperatives and self-build projects. Ward was an admirer of Walter Segal whose self-building system he saw as exemplary of such an approach to housing, promoting participation and dweller control. Much of Ward's later writing was historical in nature, in Cotters and Squatters he wrote a history of informal customs for the appropriation of land in Britain that included the Digger movement, the Plotlanders of southern England and the Welsh tradition of tŷ unnos, where a house is built in one night, which also has its echoes in the geçekondus of Turkey and the amateur building tactics of the global South. Other books uncovered the history of allotments or the creative ways in which children inhabit their environments.
      Ward's writings did much to dispel popular myths and stereotypes associated with anarchism, as well as demonstrating the practical applicability of such an approach to a wide range of issues pertinent to architecture.

 A man, a loss to the anarchist movement but his writings and thoughts live on.

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Beware the Friendly Pat On The Shoulder.

       When you look across the planet and see the injustice, inequality, poverty, deprivation, death and destruction, all exacerbated by deliberately engineered brutal wars, and you see the ecological disaster foisted on us all by unbridled corporate planet plundering, it is difficult to sum it all up. You feel to detail the mess that we find ourselves in would take a massive volume of unreadable proportions.
       Yet on analysis it is relatively simple, our economic system of capitalism is the root cause of practically all our problems. It spawns inequality, it breeds poverty, it engineers those avoidable wars, it legitimises the destruction of our planet, yet the vast majority of the population still run to the ballot box to vote for more of the same. We listen to the managers of the system telling us blatant lies, that by now we should recognise as propaganda to safeguard their wealth, power and privileges.
       As long as we tolerate a system that is designed to allow the few to amass vast fortunes at the expense of the many, we will stay mired in the mess that we find ourselves in at present, or worse, our extinction.
        I'm sure it is not beyond our imagination to devise a sustainable system of fairness, a system based on co-operation, mutual aid and respect for each other, a system that would see to the needs of all our people. I am also sure that such a system is a desire deep in the hearts of all peoples across the planet. What's stopping us? All it requires is for us all, in solidarity with each other, to act on those desires, the tool to get us there is of course anarchism.

    A paragraph that I think sums up what our attitude to this society should be is one stated by Jean Paul Marat:

       "Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces":

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Hunt The ****.

       I don't as a rule, often slate individual political ballerinas, they are all dangerous charlatans in my book, and all deserve the same level of contempt. However sometimes something appears in the "news" that seems to set me off on a rant, and Jeremy Hunt's call for a massive increase in war spending, just tipped me over the edge, though it shouldn't have, as it is just true to form. 

      Jeremy Hunt, our foreign secretary, admirer of Trump, has come out with an appeal for the government to vastly increase its spending on its war machine, in line with Trump's demands and sabre rattling. I'm surprised he can talk at all, due to the very large silver spoon he was born with in his mouth. Deemed to be the richest member of the cabinet, is quite a claim among a bunch of very rich and privileged parasites.

      This privileged prancing political ballerina, making such demands, is obviously unaware of the increasing poverty among our children and working families, he will not have noticed the homelessness, areas crying out for more resources. How could he be aware of these facts, he is from a different world. He has an excellent pedigree for his class, a product of the Oxbridge sausage factory, a distant relative of Queen Elizabeth II and Oswald Mosley, and from a Royal Navy background, what more could his class ask for.

     These are the types of other world privileged parasites that we allow to shape our lives and our communities, they shape society to the benefit of their class and to hell with the population at large. No doubt his bold militaristic demands is to win the hearts and minds of his party's backwoods, shooting and fishing landed gentry, in an endeavour to land the big job, party leader. 

     Why do we let them take our wealth and turn it into a war machine for their benefit only? Why do we allow those from another alien privileged world to keep us under the yoke of poverty, while they play war games for the benefit of their class and their class alone? Surely we can see through their subterfuge, illusions and lies. We don't belong in their world, and they certainly don't belong in ours.

From Wikipedia:

Early life and education

        Jeremy Hunt was born in Lambeth Hospital, Kennington,[5] the eldest son of Admiral Sir Nicholas Hunt,[6] who was then a Commander in the Royal Navy assigned to work for the Director of Naval Plans inside the recently created Ministry of Defence,[7] and his wife Meriel Eve née Givan (now Lady Hunt), daughter of Major Henry Cooke Givan.[8] Hunt is a descendant of Streynsham Master, a pioneer of the East India Company.[9]
       Hunt was raised in Shere, Surrey, near the constituency that he represents in Parliament.[10] He is a distant relation of Elizabeth II and Oswald Mosley.[11]
      Hunt was educated at Charterhouse where he was Head of School.[6] He then read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, and took a first class honoursBachelor of Arts (BA) degree. He became involved in Conservative politics while at university, where David Cameron and Boris Johnson were contemporaries.[12] He was active in the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA), and was elected to serve as President in 1987.[12]

 Early career
       After university Hunt worked for two years as a management consultant at OC&C Strategy Consultants, and then became an English language teacher in Japan.[13]

      On his return to Britain he tried his hand at a number of different entrepreneurial business ventures, including a failed attempt to export marmalade to Japan.[14] In 1991, Hunt co-founded a public relations agency named Profile PR specialising in IT with Mike Elms, a childhood friend.[13] Hunt and Elms later sold their interest in Profile PR to concentrate on directory publishing.
       Hunt had been interested in creating a 'guide to help people who want to study rather than just travel abroad'[15] and together with Elms founded a company known as Hotcourses in the 1990s, a major client of which is the British Council.[16] Hunt stood down as director of the company in 2009, however still retained 48% of the shares in the company which were held in a blind trust, before Hotcourses was sold in January 2017 for over £30 million to Australian education organisation IDP Education. He personally gained over £14 million from the sale and in doing so became the richest Cabinet member.[16][17][18]

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Voltairine de Cleyre.

          I have always enjoyed the poems of Voltairine de Cleyre, (November 17, 1866–June 20, 1912) and admired the woman. What some Glaswegians may not know is that she visited Glasgow and thanks to Glasgow anarchist comrades she got to see some parts of Scotland outside Glasgow, and stated she loved the highlands. Though I think it was mainly around the Loch Lomond area that she visited.
           I particularly like this poem by Voltairine;

 

The Road Builders

(“Who built the beautiful roads?” queried a friend of the present order, as we walked one day along the macadamized driveway of Fairmount Park.)

I saw them toiling in the blistering sun,
Their dull, dark faces leaning toward the stone,
Their knotted fingers grasping the rude tools,
Their rounded shoulders narrowing in their chest,
The sweat dro’s dripping in great painful beads.
I saw one fall, his forehead on the rock,
The helpless hand still cluthcing at the spade,
The slack mouth full of earth.
And he was dead.
His comrades getnly turned his face, until
The fierce sun glittered hard upon his eyes,
Wide open, staring at the cruel sky.
The blood yet ran upon the jagged stone;
But it was ended. He was quite, quite dead:
Driven to death beneath the burning sun,
Driven to death upon the road he built.
He was no “hero”, he; a poor, black man,
Taking “the will of God” and asking naught;
Think of him thus, when next your horse’s feet
Strike out the flint spark from the gleaming road;
Think that for this, this common thing, The Road,
A human creature died; ‘tis a blood gift,
To an o’erreaching world that does not thank.
Ignorant, mean and soulless was he? Well —
Still human; and you drive upon his corpse.

Philadelphia, 24 July 1900

This from Anarchist News: 

Voltairine de Cleyre:

American Radical

        Born in Michigan in 1866, Voltairine de Cleyre was named after Voltaire. By the time she died forty-five years later, she had lived up to the free-thinking and trouble-making reputation of her namesake. The famous activist Emma Goldman called de Cleyre “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.”

De Cleyre wrote:

        The first act of our life was to kick against an unjust decree of our parents, and we have unflinchingly stood for the kicking principle ever since. Now, if the word kicking is in bad repute with you, substitute non-submission, insubordination, rebellion, revolt, revolution, whatever name you please which expresses non-acquiescence to injustice.

       Her own father was a working-class French immigrant who earned his American citizenship fighting in the Civil War. Her mother was the child of abolitionists. Her parents sent young Voltairine to a convent school, where she learned how to be a debater and an atheist. She was writing poetry at six. At nineteen, she was writing and lecturing on Free Thought, the philosophical idea that truth should be based on reason and empiricism rather than authority and dogma.

De Cleyre’s radicalism was above all “a rhetoric of self-decolonization aimed at disrupting the ideological configuration of her readers’ interior lives, freeing them to rearticulate those lives.”

        In her short life, she would publish “hundreds of works—poems, sketches, essays, lectures, pamphlets, translations, and short stories,” writes scholar Eugenia DeLamotte. And yet de Cleyre would be largely excluded from history for the next century because of her radical stance. DeLamotte describes de Cleyre’s radicalism as above all “a rhetoric of self-decolonization aimed at disrupting the ideological configuration of her readers’ interior lives, freeing them to rearticulate those lives” and imagine change.

         De Cleyre made a precarious living in Philadelphia teaching English to the Jewish immigrant community. She also tirelessly wrote, edited, lecture, and organized. The events of the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886—which led to four anarchists being executed after a dubious trial, as part of the struggle for the eight-hour work day—turned her into an anarchist.

        In her essay on de Cleyre, communications scholar Catherine Helen Palczewski explores de Cleyre’s radical critique of the “sex question” in such writings as “The Gates of Freedom,” “Sex Slavery,” “They Who Marry Do Ill,” and “Why I Am an Anarchist.”

According to Palczewski, contemporary reformers like Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Crystal Eastman, Helen Gurley Flynn, and Louise Bryant likened marriage to prostitution. “De Cleyre, by contrast, developed a general critique of social roles and institutions by rejecting the institution of marriage, arguing that women are raped in marriage, not prostituted by it.” In de Cleyre’s own words, “And that is rape, where a man forces himself sexually upon a woman whether he is licensed by the marriage law to do it or not. And that is the vilest of all tyranny where a man compels the woman he says he loves, to endure the agony of bearing children that she does not want.”

De Cleyre also rejected the social purity movement of the day and the suppression of obscenity that went along with it. Birth control information, for example, was then considered obscene.

       Palczewski calls de Cleyre “an important rhetorical and feminist figure because her anarchist feminism is an early precursor to many of the radical critiques of women’s sexual status that came out of the ‘second wave’ of feminism.”

        Intellectually fierce, de Cleyre had a short and difficult life. She wrote her own epitaph: “I die, as I have lived, a free spirit, an Anarchist, owing no allegiance to rulers, heavenly or earthly.”

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Glasgow, International Women's Day- March 8th.

Wikipedia:
        International Women's Day (IWD) is celebrated on March 8 every year.[3] It is a focal point in the movement for women's rights.
       After the Socialist Party of America organised a Women's Day on February 28, 1909 in New York, the 1910 International Socialist Woman's Conference suggested a Women's Day be held annually. After women gained suffrage in Soviet Russia in 1917, March 8 became a national holiday there. The day was then predominantly celebrated by the socialist movement and communist countries until it was adopted in 1975 by the United Nations.
      Today, International Women's Day is a public holiday in some countries and largely ignored elsewhere.[4] In some places, it is a day of protest; in others, it is a day that celebrates womanhood. 

      If you are in Glasgow on that particular day, why not swell the numbers for women's rights, which are human rights, take part in Glasgow's celebration of International Women's Day? 

    In honour of International Women's Day-- Friday, 8 March-- a Rally and Walk of Pride will be assembling at 12 Noon in the Glasgow City Centre at the Dewar's statue in Buchanan Street.
      All are welcome to come together for singing, an open mic, a display of banners and placards, and leaflets on the history of this international holiday, and the ongoing importance of speaking out and fighting back against the twin evils of capitalism and patriarchy.
     This will be followed by a Walk of Pride through George Square to the City Chambers to honour, in song and in spirit, ourselves, each other, and all lovers of liberty and equality. Please join us as we demand respect and our rights: in our homes, our neighbourhoods, and our workplaces.
     More information on this event, and the Industrial Workers of the World, is available from https://iwwscotland.wordpress.com/

   

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America, Land Of Slave Labour.

         Slave labour is alive and well in 21st century capitalism, captured in camps and forced to work for little or nothing is a way of life in that so called "leader of the free world" America. The country that marauds around the globe bombing other countries into oblivion while stating it is "liberating" them. It certainly is the world's leader in destruction abroad, and slavery at home. 

Wikipedia:

Incarceration in the United States is one of the main forms of punishment and rehabilitation for the commission of felony and other offenses. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, and the highest per-capita incarceration rate.^[3][4] In 2016 in the US, there were 655 people incarcerated per 100,000 population. This is the US incarceration rate or adults or people tried as adults.^[5][3]

        America accounts for approximately 25% of the world's prison population while accounting for only 5% of the world's population, and this gigantic prison population is milked by the American corporate world. Slavery on a massive scale, legitimised by the supposed leader of the "democratic" world. The word "democratic" sticks in your throat when mentioned in the same breath as capitalism. At the moment, approximately 2.3 million people are locked up in American prisons.

        Influenced by enormous corporate lobbying, the United States Congress enacted the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program in 1979 which permitted US companies to use prison labour. Coupled with the drastic increase in the prison population during this period, profits for participating companies and revenue for the government and its private contractors soared. The Federal Bureau of Prisons now runs a programme called Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR) that pays inmates under one dollar an hour. The programme generated $500m in sales in 2016 with little of that cash being passed down to prison workers. Stateside, where much of the US addiction to mass incarceration lies, is no different. California's prison labour programme is expected to produce some $232m in sales in 2017.
       These exploited labourers are disproportionately African American and Latino - a demographic status quo resulting from the draconian sentencing and other criminal justice policies ransacking minority communities across the United States. African Americans are incarcerated at a rate five times higher than that of whites. In states like Virginia and Oklahoma, one in every 14 or 15 African American men are put in prison.  

 
        “Militant actions in support of the prison strike will send a powerful message of defiance to the American state and solidarity to rebels inside prison walls.”

From Revolutionary Abolition:

        On August 21st, people locked up in prisons throughout the United States are set to go on strike, calling attention not only to heinous abuses and inhumane conditions, but also to the ongoing enslavement of millions of people inside American prisons. After the Civil War, slavery remained institutionalized in American society through the constitution’s 13th amendment, which allows slavery to remain as punishment for a crime. In America, black people’s criminalization is enforced by police who frequently shoot black people with impunity and by judges who sentence black people to draconian sentences, ensuring their enslavement in modern-day plantations.
        Facing a situation meant to stifle any glimmer of joy and humanity, people in prisons across the United States are calling attention to the “lack of respect for human life that is embedded in our nation’s penal ideology” by courageously going on strike from August 21st to September 9th.
       The dates, chosen by prison organizers, signify the strike’s continuation with the legacies of Nat Turner, who began his rebellion on August 21, 1831, and the Attica Uprising, which began September 9, 1971. Nat Turner, who was born into slavery, took part in a major insurrection, freeing slaves from plantations and executing slave owners. The Attica Uprising, an important milestone for prison resistance in the United States, took place following the shooting of black revolutionary George Jackson by a prison guard during an escape attempt. Like Nat Turner and the Attica rebels before them, prison strikers today are fighting for black liberation and the abolition of slavery.
       Revolutionaries around the world should be aware of the struggle against slavery in America’s prisons. The Trump presidency is one of the most barbaric regimes in the world today, continuing a long legacy of racism, exploitation and genocide engrained in the American state. People in prisons rising up to regain their humanity are providing some of the most inspiring resistance of the Trump era to the horrifying, dehumanizing policies of America’s judicial system.
        We call on comrades around the world to join in solidarity actions with the prison strike in the United States. The American state and corporations that benefit from prison slave labor must be held accountable for their atrocities by revolutionaries through direct action in locations around the world. Actions targeting American consulates and companies benefiting from slave labor, and destroying symbols of American prison slavery will draw the world’s attention to the struggle taking place within the prisons.
        Militant actions in support of the prison strike will send a powerful message of defiance to the American state and solidarity to rebels inside prison walls.

Burn the prisons!
Support the prison strike!
Long live international solidarity!

revolutionaryabolition.

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

Anti-fascism In Greece.

      The recent history of the people of Greece has been one of violent struggle. During the second World war, they were occupied by the Nazis, at the end of that war the patriots, that had fought to help drive the Nazis out, found themselves engaged in a war with the British imperial military, who under Churchill's dictate, wanted to eliminate any left-wing resistance to his plan to restore the Greek monarchy, which would be compliant to the will of the British imperialists. However, even the wealthy class in Greece didn't want that bunch back again. Greece was then racked by a civil war as the various factions struggled for control. An authoritarian government gave way to a military take over, ushering the Regime of The Colonels, which despite strong resistance, lasted until 1974. This is a very short, abbreviated, truncated, history of the people of Greece, but it does give you some idea of why there is such strong hatred of the fascists, in that tortured and decimated country.

 Cretan Guerillas attacking Germany soldiers on the island of Crete.

This from Act For Freedom Now:

WE CAME AND WE WILL COME AGAIN

       On Sunday 2/10 we attacked the building that houses the offices of the Golden Dawn. We threw paint in all spaces of the building and torched the entrance to the offices of the local organization. Our priority was to not threat any human lives so we limited the expansion of the fire. So the “well-wishers” should drop the nonsense about a new Marfin bank incident.
      Our choice to target the residents and owners had clear motives. We want to clarify to them that we consider them jointly responsible for the existence of the fascists’ offices in the city. The historical period we are going through is crucial, and social polarization is inevitable. Thus, we think veryone must be a vital cell in the developments, if we wanna hope for a world without fascists and other such scum. Those who, consciously or not, choose to maintain a neutral stance are complicit to the existence of the fascist leprosy. Those who are responsible for the fact that the war with fascism is so long-term are those who every now and then offered them peace.
      Recently a discussion has opened about the arrival of 2000 refugees and their allocation to the sland of Crete. Simultaneously, all sorts of nationalists-patriots found an opportunity to take to the streets and propagate a sewer of hate and xenophobia. Culminating to the recent incidents in Rethimno, when on Wednesday 28/9 they attacked the antifascist gathering together with the riot cops and in the following days they harassed and beat anyone they did not like. Therefore, this act is a warning message. A small reminder, that our grandparents hung the fascists, they didn’t vote for them, nor did they rent apartments to them. As an active part of the antifascist movement, we are not willing to accept any racist delirium, whether it comes from the murderers of the Golden Dawn, or the scum of Artemis Sorras or anyone else. We will respond accordingly with any means at our disposal. Because you either tolerate fascism or you fight it.

P.S. As for the lads of the G.D., we will meet again and in person…

Next door extremists.

Source

Translated by Act for freedom now!

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Workers Know Your History, State Murders.

        The dark days of Spain's fascist dictator Franco, should not be forgotten. His regime brutally put down any any left-wing opposition in the country by, prison, torture and execution. The last executions carried out under his regime was on September 27, 1975, when 5 individuals were executed by firing squad. Franco died two months later, and some dark clouds lifted from the country of Spain.

Graphic from arrezafe:

From Wikipedia:

            The last use of capital punishment in Spain took place on 27 September 1975 when two members of the armed Basque nationalist and separatist group ETA political-military and three members of the Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front (FRAP) were shot dead by firing squads after having been convicted and sentenced to death by military tribunals for the murder of policemen and civil guards. Spain was Western Europe's last dictatorship at this time and had been unpopular and internationally isolated in the post-war period due to its relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the fact that the authoritarian Spanish leader, Francisco Franco, had come to power by overthrowing a democratically elected government. As a result, the executions resulted in substantial criticism of the Spanish government, both domestically and abroad. Reactions included street protests, attacks on Spanish embassies, international criticism of the Spanish government and diplomatic measures, such as the withdrawal of the ambassadors of fifteen European countries.

        This was the last use of the death penalty in Spain; following the death of Francisco Franco, two months later, no further executions took place. The 1978 Spanish Constitution largely abolished the death penalty, with the exception of limited cases in times of war, and these exceptions were abolished in 1995. In 2012, a Basque Government commission found that the processes used to convict two of those executed had violated their rights and awarded compensation to their families.

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What Is An Anarchist?

         What is an anarchist? I suppose there are probably as many answers to that question as there are anarchists. No bad thing, when you consider that the individual is at the heart of anarchism. However, there is common ground among most anarchists, but explaining that to someone who is not an anarchist can be difficult.

       There is a small text by Émile Armand (pseudonym of Ernest-Lucien Juin Armand); 26 March 1872 – 19 February 1963, called Mini-Manual of Individualist Anarchism, though I don't agree with its entirety, what anarchist would agree with the entirety of another anarchist's work, There is a particular paragraph which quite explicitly lays out what is an anarchist.

       The anarchist has for enemy the State and all its institutions which tend to maintain or to perpetuate its stranglehold on the individual. There is no possibility of conciliation between the anarchist and any form whatever of society resting on authority, whether it emanates from an autocrat, from an aristocracy, or from a democracy. No common ground between the anarchist and any environment regulated by the decisions of a majority or the wishes of an elite. The anarchist combats for the same reason the teaching furnished by the State and that dispensed by the Church. He is the adversary of monopolies and of privileges, whether they are of the intellectual, moral or economic order. In a word, he is the irreconcilable antagonist of every regime, of every social system, of every state of things that implies the domination of man or the environment over the individual and the exploitation of the individual by another or by the group.

      The work of the anarchist is above all a work of critique. The anarchist goes, sowing revolt against that which oppresses, obstructs, opposes itself to the free expansion of the individual being. He agrees first to rid brains of preconceived ideas, to put at liberty temperaments enchained by fear, to give rise to mindsets free from popular opinion and social conventions; it is thus that the anarchist will push all comers to make route with him to rebel practically against the determinism of the social environment, to affirm themselves individually, to sculpt his internal statue, to render themselves, as much as possible, independent of the moral, intellectual and economic environment. He will urge the ignorant to instruct himself, the nonchalant to react, the feeble to become strong, the bent to straighten. He will push the poorly endowed and less apt to pull from themselves all the resources possible and not to rely on others.

         Taking that as our starting point, I think it makes clear to non anarchists the direction we wish to go.

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Workers Grasp Your Future, Kropotkin.

      We should always remember our own, they are our history and our future. Though a day late with this one, better late than ignore. 

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin born in Moscow December 9th 1842, died on this day, February 8th. 1921, aged 78. He left behind a legacy of writings, ideas, dreams and hopes. 

Kropotkin aged 57.

From Wikipedia:

      Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between workers. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.[10]-------

------Kropotkin died of pneumonia on February 8, 1921, in the city of Dmitrov, and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery. Thousands of people marched in his funeral procession, including, with Vladimir Lenin's approval,[35] anarchists carrying banners with anti-Bolshevik slogans.[36] It was to become the last public demonstration of anarchists, which saw engaged speeches by Emma Goldman and Aron Baron. In 1957 the Dvorets Sovetov station of the Moscow Metro was renamed Kropotkinskaya in his honor.

Read his works HERE:

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Workers, Know Your History, Ben Reitman.

       Ben Reitman was an anarchist, born 1879, died from a heart attack in Chicago 1943. During his life he was kidnapped, beaten, tarred and feather and branded and later, 100 years ago tomorrow, in January 17th, 1916, imprisoned for the horrific crime of, distributing leaflets on birth control. That's democracy for you. These heroes of the working class are airbrushed out of history, the establishment  would rather they never happened, or at least are forgotten. We have a duty to remember and record those who fought on the side of the ordinary people for that better world for all.

From Wikipedia:

        Reitman was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to poor Russian Jewish immigrants in 1879, but grew up in Chicago. At the age of ten, he became a hobo, but returned to Chicago and worked in the Polyclinic Laboratory as a "laboratory boy".[2] In 1900, he entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Chicago, completing his medical studies in 1904. During this time he was briefly married; he and his wife had a daughter together.[2]
        He worked as a physician in Chicago, choosing to offer services to hobos, prostitutes, the poor, and other outcasts. Notably, he performed abortions, which were illegal at the time.[2]
      Reitman met Emma Goldman in 1908, and the two began a passionate love affair, which Goldman described as the "Great Grand Passion" of her life.[1] The two traveled together for almost eight years, working for the cause of birth control, free speech, worker's rights, and anarchism.
        During this time, the couple became involved in the San Diego free speech fight in 1912–13. Reitman was kidnapped by a mob, severely beaten, tarred and feathered, branded with "I.W.W.,"[1] and his rectum and testicles were abused.[3] Several years later, the couple were arrested in 1916 under the Comstock laws for advocating birth control, and Reitman served six months in prison.[4]
        Both believed in free love, but Reitman's practice incited feelings of jealousy in Goldman.[5] He remarried when one of his lovers became pregnant; their son was born while he was in prison.[2] Goldman and Reitman ended their relationship in 1917, after Reitman was released from prison.[2]
         Reitman returned to Chicago, ultimately working with the City of Chicago, establishing the Chicago Society for the Prevention of Venereal Disease in the 1930s.[2] His second wife died in 1930, and Reitman married a third time, to Rose Siegal.[2] Reitman later became seriously involved with Medina Oliver, and the couple had four daughters — Mecca, Medina, Victoria, and Olive.[2]
      Reitman died in Chicago of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three. He was buried at the Waldheim Cemetery[6] (now Forest Home Cemetery), in Forest Park, Chicago.

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