Organising the Savita protest march – Answering a failed anti-choice smear from 2012

I wrote the following text in November 2012 to have ready in case a smear campaign directed at the freshly renewed pro-choice movement in Ireland gained any real traction beyound the media stories mentioned below. I didn’t publish it at the time as it failed to get traction and thus this would, at best, have been […]

The 1848 Revolutions: An Anarchist Perspective

This is a write-up of a talk I gave at the Sparrow’s Nest Archive in Nottingham on 23 June 2018. The talk was advertised by the following text: The Revolutions of 1848 remain the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history. While remembered as essentially liberal in nature, aiming at ending the old monarchical regimes […]

The 2018 March for Choice in the aftermath of winning Repeal

This video shows all of the 2018 March for Choice pass down the quays in Dublin.  This year we had won the refrendum but much is left to fight for in terms of the details of the legislation and standing down the inevotable anti-choice attempts that will be made once the lefislation comes in to intimidate […]

Propertarianism and Fascism

As discussed previously in ASR (in “160 Years of Libertarian,” ASR 71-2), the good word libertarian was knowingly stolen from the left by American right-wing (classical) liberals in the 1950s. This appropriation of libertarian to describe an ideology which happily supports “voluntary” slavery and dictatorship by property owners, never mind wage-labour, has resulted in much […]

The State and Revolution: Theory and Practice

The State and Revolution: Theory and Practice This is almost my chapter in the anthology Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrrevolution (Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2017). Some revisions were made during the editing process which are not included here. In addition, references to the 1913 French edition of Kropotkin’s Modern Science and Anarchy have been […]

Precursors of Syndicalism

It is a standard cliché of Marxist attacks on anarchism to contrast “individualistic” anarchism with “collectivist” syndicalism. The former are backward looking, reactionary and beyond the pale while the latter are almost Marxist, and so worthy of faint praise. Another, also wrong, cliché has wider acceptance, namely that syndicalism arose in France during the 1890s […]

Stand 4 Truth – demanding accountability from catholic church during Papal visit

As many as 10,000 people took part in the Stand for Truth rally yesterday, and marched in complete silence to the site of the last Magdalene Laundry to close on Sean MacDermott street [video].  In effect this was a counter protest to the Papal Rally taking place uptake road in the Phoenix park in the […]

Occupation of 35 Summerhill Parade in Dublin to protest evictions in May

In May five houses on Summerhill Parade in Dublin were evicted on almost no notice with some 120 people being thrown on the street.  All were owned by the same landlord who in order to make super profits had packed people in, 6-8  to a room, charging them 350-450 each  per month for space on […]

Savita was one of us – we owe her our Yes to Repeal this Friday

At the start of the referendum campaign in March, I took this photograph showing the poster image of Savita, who died because of the 8th amendment, and in the background a huge billboard with a CGI / cartoon of what is meant to be an 11 week old foetus.  Both have the common slogan ‘one […]