[Chapter from AK Press "The End of the World as We Know It?"] In a blurry black and white photograph from Italy in the 1960s, a worker rides a Vespa past a factory wall on which is scrawled operaist graffiti "Il Vietnam è in fabbrica" – Vietnam is in the factory. Today it would be […]
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Garda aggression in Erris as Shell remove Tunnel Boring Machine
Almost two years after Shell smuggled their Tunnel Boring Machine out of Dublin port in the middle of the night, and then spent 3 days meeting resistance across the country before getting stuck in the bog, they removed it from Erris Monday night.
Turnips, hammers & the square – why workplace occupations have faded
What if we build it and they don’t come? That was the experience of the left during the crisis – decades had been spent building organisations and a model of how crisis would create revolution but when the crisis arrived the left discovered that the masses weren’t convinced. The expected pattern of crisis leading to […]
Sages and Movements: An Incomplete Peter Kropotkin Bibliography
This article appeared in Anarchist Studies (volume 22, number 1) in the spring of 2014
Who are the Makhnovists and what are they fighting for? – 27 April 1920
1. The Makhnovists are peasants and workers who rose as early as 1918 against the tyranny of the German-Magyar, Austrian and Hetmanite bourgeois power in the Ukraine. The Makhnovists are those toilers who raised the banner of combat against the rule of Denikin and all other forms of oppression, violence and lies, whatever their origin. […]
What is the Anarchist Revolution – Nestor Makhno
I am an anarchist and a revolutionary myself, and I took part in the activities of the revolutionary peoples of the Ukraine. I often made tactical errors on this difficult path, as I was often weak and unable to make judgements. But because I correctly understood the goal towards which I and my brothers were […]
Organisation in the first months of the Makhnovists – 1918
Victory or death. This is what confronts the peasants of the Ukraine at the present moment in history. But we shall not all perish. There are too many of us. We are humanity. So we must win – win not so that we may follow the example of past years and hand over our fate […]
Summons – Nestor Makhno poem from 1907
This poem was written by a 23 year old Nestor Makhno was under arrest for the second time for "illegal subversive association". Originally from a poor peasant family as an iron founary worker he had joined the anarchist organization in Huliaipole. The state falled to convict him in 1907 but in 1910 he was sentenced […]
To All Peasants and Workers of the Ukraine – Nestor Makhno 7 January 1920
Brother toilers! The Revolutionary, Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (Makhnovists) was called into being as a protest against the oppression of workers and peasants by the bourgeois-landlord authorities on one side and the Bolshevik-Communist dictatorship on the other. Setting itself the goal to fight for the complete liberation of the toilers of the Ukraine from […]
Libertarian Socialism: Beyond Anarchism and Marxism?
The links between the two schools of revolutionary socialism – Marxism and class struggle anarchism – have produced much debate, some more helpful than others. Into the helpful pile comes Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) edited by Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta and Dave Berry. Twelve excellent chapters and […]