Sorry to come across like a bunch of capitalists but these things run smoother if we know who’s coming and get the money in early.
Stalls are £25 each but if paid by the end of May you can have one for £18.
We’ve got a lot more room this year so if you need more than one table just ask and we’ll sort something out.
Invitation to Dorset Radical Bookfair 2019
Booking form for stalls and meetings
e-mail: dorsetbookfair@riseup.net
In Bulgaria, antifascist prisoner and prison organiser Jock Palfreeman continues his hunger strike, which has now gone on for a month. The Bulgarian families and friends of prisoners group write:
“Jock Palfreeman’s hunger strike is in its 30th day today, May 21st. On April 21st 2019, Palfreeman declared a hunger strike due to the systematic pressure and harassment that he has been subjected to over the last two years from the prison administration and the Ministry of Justice because of his human rights work with Bulgarian Prisoners’ Association and as a form of protest against widespread corruption and abuse of power in Bulgarian prisons.
Palfreeman and BRPA are targeted for the political work they are doing within prisons and for speaking up against its administration and representatives of the Ministry of Justice!
Lekhetho Mtetwa, a member of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) discusses his role in the Landless People’s Movement (LPM), formed in South Africa in 2001.
While the LPM was affiliated to Via Campesina, and linked to the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra: MST), its activities centred on urban squatter communities, rather than farm occupations or organising alternative agrarian systems.
Then-living in a squatter camp in Protea South, Soweto, Mtetwa served as the local secretary; by 2013, this was the key LPM branch. Several attempts were made by political parties to capture Protea South LPM, using patronage and promises, leading to the eventual implosion of the branch. Mtetwa provides an essential analysis of the rise and fall of the LPM, and the role that anarchists can play in such social movements.
I concluded Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas with excerpts from Errico Malatesta’s inspiring piece, “Toward Anarchy.” Often mistranslated as “Toward Anarchism,” Malatesta’s article was originally published in La Questione Sociale, No. 14, in December 1899, which Malatesta was then editing from Paterson, New Jersey. It was first translated into English in Man!, published out of San Francisco, in April 1933. Here I present the complete article, with a corrected translation by Davide Turcato. This translation of “Toward Anarchy” is included in Volume IV of theComplete Works of Malatesta, edited and compiled by Davide Turcato, and published by AK Press. Here, Malatesta presents not only a succinct definition of “anarchy” as conceived by the anarchists, but also of his “experimental” method, a non-dogmatic approach to revolutionary change by which one always seeks to achieve as much freedom as possible, given the circumstances…
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Up in Shenfield, 8,789 people have signed a petition to save their library from closure: Strong campaign to save local library. It’s felt that anger about the threatened closure of the library led to a local Tory councillor losing her seat in the recent local elections to a Liberal Democrat. In the mainstream national media, a lot of commentators have said that frustrations over Brexit were a significant factor in the Tories getting a drubbing in the locals. However, given the situation in Essex with the level of discontent over the planned library closures, it’s clear that this influenced the way people cast their votes. Whatever you may think of the Lib Dems, voting one in as a councillor isn’t exactly a sign of rage from angry Brexiteers!
When you take into account the local actions that have been taking place across Essex: GALLEYWOOD MARCHES TO SAVE LIBRARY and: NEARLY…
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Reproduced in full from Verso Books
An open letter, originally published in French, written by a collective of French ‘Gilets Jaunes’ university academics – reacting to the social inequalities raised by the Yellow Vests movement, the series of measures the French government has taken since the movement’s beginning on 17 November 2018, and to abuses by the police forces during demonstrations and protest actions. The letter demands an acknowledgement of the movement’s demands, the resignation of the Interior Minister, and public inquiries into the violent repression that has swept France. As of the 15 May 2019, the letter has collected over 20,000 signatures. It joins similar calls and reactions by famous artists and medical doctors
By translating this letter, we call on academics and intellectuals worldwide to support the movement and sign an international call of support which you can find here.
We accuse!
Since November 17, 2018, hundreds of thousands of citizens have expressed their concerns that their demands have been met by a deafening silence from the government. They have found the strength and courage to say, loud and clear, that they are tired and will no longer suffer the consequences of the harmful policies that have been plundering their work and common goods with impunity for decades.
The voices of the Yellow Vests have exposed the “scientific” lies and justifications given by the government and its assembly of courtiers to negate and cover-up the scale and significance of such exploitation. Their uprising showed the actual meaning of a policy that consciously organised the transfer of labour-accumulated value from 95% of the population to the 5% wealthiest elites. Their strength has been to raise awareness on the duplicity of power, power confident enough to boast about having multiplied by four the enormous wealth held by a tiny minority.
With the vast majority of the French people, we recognise ourselves in the awareness raised by the Yellow Vests. Each of us has become conscious of how we are faced, in all sectors of society, with the consequences of similar policies that only serve to intensify social inequalities.
From the start, the demands and expectations of change arising from this popular uprising have been clearly articulated. They immediately clashed with a power that never ceased to ignore their content, so as to reduce their challenging impact. It was first the deafening silence of a president and his court, holed up in their palace. It was then the attempt to deceive the crowd with false promises and crumbs from the table of the powerful–as always clawed back from the poor and from public services. Next came the setting up of a mere impression of consultation in which any possibility of interaction and debate was very skillfully excluded. It was, above all, the clear and thoughtful decision to prevent by all means the public expression of expectations and fully articulated demands.
Every effort has been made to silence the protesters. Starting from the initial weekly Saturday Acts, the authorities chose to respond with violence by asking the security forces to clear motorway tolls, roundabouts, to block access to demonstration rally spots and, above all, to “resolutely” intervene. We have all witnessed the consequences of these orders on the ground: we have witnessed with our own eyes the arbitrary filtering and arrests at town access points, preventing freedom of speech as well as demonstrations from taking place. We have witnessed the huts built at the roundabouts destroyed and relentlessly and bravely rebuilt. The purposely designed police intervention techniques (kettling, firing of tear gas from the beginning of the demonstrations, firing of defensive ball launcher grenades (LBD) without warning) were just incitements for the rare acts of violence triggered by deliberately seeking confrontation with the demonstrators.
Week after week, this lethal and repressive technique has been applied with increasing intensity. Protected by the government and covered by a code of silence shared by a large part of the media, exhausted police troops indulge into the worst abuses. Hundreds of peacefully protesting men and women have been attacked without reason and mostly with insane doggedness. Since December, the number of serious concussions has been steadily increasing: there are hundreds of people who have suffered severe injuries. Not a single mention was spoken by President Macron or his government regarding the victims, even for Zineb Redouane, killed after being hit by a teargas grenade as she was closing the windows of her 4th floor apartment. Nothing seems to be able to stop this dramatic escalation and we are ashamed to have to witness the self-congratulation of the authorities supposed to contain what President Macron termed a “hate crowd” (French: foules haineuses).
Choosing to violently repress all those who dare to rise and speak against these activities is certainly not new. It has been tested and practiced in the poor neighbourhoods and against vulnerable groups such as migrants and Roma or against other social movements. However, since November 2018 a threshold has been crossed. This strategy of violent repression culminated in the demonstration of May 1, 2019: not only was the full range of the state’s repressive arsenal deployed but the government was found once again guilty of fake news, with the supposed “attack” of the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital by demonstrators who had gone there to seek refuge. This government’s lie is a lie too many. It reveals the flimsy state of relentlessness and panic of a government at bay.
This state violence must stop!
We accuse the interior Minister of knowingly provoking violent reactions in our cities, on our roundabouts and public forums, in order to criminalise anyone who opposes its laws and harmful policies.
We accuse the government of using weapons of war banned in most Western countries against civilians, ignoring the repeated warnings of several international bodies.
We accuse the hierarchy of the judiciary of having agreed to cover up the government’s harmful policies by blindly and slavishly following orders given by the executive power.
We accuse the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) of expediting fake investigations, which, to our knowledge, did not result in the indictment of any member of the “law and order” forces.
We accuse those in the press and television media who have agreed to become mouthpieces of the interior Ministry and the prefecture without any check or oversight of their sources.
We call on all citizens to join the social movement to denounce the authoritarian drift of the government.
We demand the resignation of Mr. Castaner, interior Minister, and the opening of an independent inquiry commission to shed light on the excesses of those accountable so that they can be brought to justice.
French version published in Mediapart: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/les-invites-de-mediapart/blog/040519/nous-acc…
as well as:
https://lundi.am/450-universitaires-se-declarent-complices-des-gilets-ja…
http://site.ldh-france.org/ldh66/toute-l-actualite/
https://www.humanite.fr/repression-le-jaccuse-des-universitaires-672041
List of signatures (circa 20,000 as of Wednesday 15 May 2019): https://hackmd.iscpif.fr/3IwYk-chRkaHyn8xyU5D0w
Link to sign the French version: https://framaforms.org/nous-accusons-1557004350
Anarchists in the Gulag (and prison and exile)
“In 1937–1938 the last anarchists in the USSR were physically eliminated by Stalin’s terror. One exception was the Ukrainian anarchist Ignaty Vasilevich Arendarenko (1898–after 1953). A native of Poltava, he joined the anarchist movement in 1919, taking part in the Poltava branch of the Nabat Anarchist Confederation and the Makhnovist movement. From 1926 to 1936 Arendarenko was either in prison or serving terms of exile. Possessed of excellent survival skills, when he had the opportunity in 1936 he began to live illegally, spending the next few years in Ukraine. Dodging first Stalin’s agents, then the Nazis, he was finally swept up in a raid in 1944 and sent to Austria as a “guest” worker. After the war he lived in Western Europe, contributing articles to the Russian-American journal Dielo Truda-Probuzhdenie (DTP). In 1952 he emigrated to Mexico. In the following article written for DTP, Arendarenko honours the memory of the fellow anarchists (and others) he met in the Soviet justice system.”
The article, What I Saw and Experienced by Ignaty Vasilevich Arendarenko (1898–after 1953) can be read at https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/pc87xw
Big thanks to Malcolm Archibald from Black Cat Press for translation and editing.
