Thank you!

To all those who made this possible by donating or lending stuff, the musicians, stallholders and meeting hosts, staff at the Beaufort and the Riviera, the ones who did the leg work beforehand, everyone who helped out and participated, we extend our heartfelt thanks and congratulations on being part of a great day and night.

As ever some folk missed it through circumstances beyond their control, our warmest wishes to Lisa who’s looking after her dad, and Jonny who sorted us out with kit then couldn’t play the gig because the babylon closed Fratton station. We hope to host Eric Laursen in future, and Critisticuffs, who kindly donated their stall fee.

Working Class Question Time was a hit, we plan to do another as a stand alone event so give us a shout if you’d like to be involved in that.

We appreciate feedback, and if you get in touch we’d like to know how you found out about the event so we can target our publicity most effectively.

Thanks again

Radical Bookfair Collective x

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Literature for Rebels (Part 2)

The Slow Burning Fuse

Anarchy in Action – Colin Ward

With chapters on the family, federations, schools, housing, crime, employment, welfare, deviancy, planning, and more, this is probably the best practical example of anarchist ideas in action. As Colin Ward writes in his introduction, “This book is not intended for people who had spent a lifetime pondering the problems of anarchism, but for those who either had no idea of what the word implied or knew exactly what it implied and rejected it, considering that it had no relevance for the modern world… It is not about strategies for revolution and it is not involved in speculation on the way an anarchist society would function. It is about the ways in which people organize themselves in any kind of human society, whether we care to categorize those societies as primitive, traditional, capitalist or communist.”

One of the most vital books I have read…available here:

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today in anarchist history

The Slow Burning Fuse

Originally published in New Society 15 May 1987
Reprinted in Freedom Vol 48 No 6 June 1987.

Colin Ward

The Case Against Voting

No politician of any colour likes a non-voter. Last week Labour MP Tony Banks introduced a bill in an almost empty House of Commons seeking to make voting compulsory .His fellow members had voted with their feet out of the chamber, but he wanted to fine those of us who fail to vote, unless, like absentees from school, we could produce ‘a legitimate reason’.

Yet the non-voters are among the largest of the political groups. Tony Banks reckons that they form 24 per cent of the electorate and he claims that ‘those ten million or so who failed to vote in 1983 have a great deal to answer for to those who did’. His assumption is that all those non-voters would have made their cross for candidates…

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My review of “Staging Life The Story of the Manchester Playwrights” by John Harding

lipstick socialist

Manchester used to  have its own municipal theatre, the Library Theatre based in Central Library and its southern sister at the Forum in Wythenshawe. In those days going to the theatre was more democratic. For many Mancunian school children like myself, it was where we were introduced to theatre through its annual Xmas play.  It was a theatre that was unpretentious and attracted a working class audience searching out for ideas and escapism through drama.

The  days of the municipal funded  theatre  have long gone,  alongside the history of Annie Horniman and the Manchester Gaiety Theatre which spawned the life of repertory theatre locally and nationally.

Gaiety Theatre

John Harding’s new and very well-researched book, Staging Life,   on the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester is much more than the story of one northern theatre company over ten years. It highlights Manchester’s significant role in the history  of repertory theatre in…

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Template e-mail in support of FW Kevan Thakrar, for TUC affiliates.

Industrial Workers of the World Dorset

Template for Wobblies

If you are a member of a T.U.C. affiliated Trade Union, please send this e-mail to the Prison Officers Association: general@poauk.org.uk,
and Trades Union Congress: info@tuc.org.uk
or write your own message.

*begins*

Dear fellow Trade Union members.

I am writing to you as a fellow member of a TUC affiliated Trade Union [Insert Union].

The reason for my email is to bring to your attention my dismay at the treatment of Kevan Thakrar who is currently being held under the CSC conditions, which can be certainly described as an unnecessarily cruel, torture-like system intended to break people mentally and thus is illegal under international law. It would seem the treatment in this facility has included severe physical, sexual and mental abuse.

While I appreciate your union was not part of the series of events, marked by institutional corruption and incompetence that led to Kevan being wrongly…

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The Limits of ‘Intersectionality’: AngryWorkers book review of ‘Striking Women – Struggles and Strategies of South Asian Women Workers from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet’, by Sundari Anitha and Ruth Pearson

Angry Workers of the World

We need books like this: in depth accounts of working class struggles, based on expansive interviews with workers involved. We read the book with special interest, given that the two disputes at Grunwick in 1976 and at Gate Gourmet airline caterer in 2005 took place in our vicinity in west London and were led by migrant women workers, who also form the majority of our colleagues in local warehouses and factories today. We therefore appreciate the work of the authors and are looking forward to reading another recently published book about a similar local strike, ‘A Victory to Remember – The 1976 Equal Pay Strike at Trico Folbeth, Brentford’, written by one of the strikers, Sally Groves, and a supporter, Vernon Merritt. We will review the book in the near future.

Apart from presenting the content of the book itself, we want to do two additional things. Firstly, we want…

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Britain’s first anti-fascist street battle?

rebel notes

A long neglected piece of radical working class and anti-fascist history was  movingly celebrated at a ceremony in the Market Square of Stockton this morning. In September 1933, it was one of several small towns in the North East of England devastated by the economic depression that was targeted by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists for recruitment to his street army and political project. The 30 or so members of the fascists resident in Stockton were joined by 100 more drawn from other northern towns and cities. They planned to march along the high street and then rally in the Market Square by the Town Hall. Local anti-fascists had got wind of this but the police hadn’t. Barely a handful of police were present when the BUF  were ambushed by more than 2,000 anti-fascists drawn from the Communist Party, Independent Labour Party, National Unemployed Workers Movement, Labour Party and…

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CrimethInc. Events in September: Book Fairs, Festivals, and Presentations in Four Countries — CrimethInc.

We’ll be speaking, tabling, and performing in several places this month: presenting in the Netherlands on resistance to rising authoritarianism, distributing literature at book fairs in the US and Serbia, and touring Greece to promote the Greek translation of From Democracy to Freedom, among other things. We will continue updating this list as more events […]

via CrimethInc. Events in September: Book Fairs, Festivals, and Presentations in Four Countries — CrimethInc.