A message from the collective – venue required!

Dear Comrades,

It looks like the Corn Exchange are planning to do away with the kitchen in their renovations, which would make it an unsuitable venue for our bookfair.

We are therefore looking for another site  for next year’s event. We’ve held bookfairs in Christchurch, Boscombe and Dorchester so will consider anywhere in the county if:

• We can hire it for 600 quid or less.
• It’s got space for 20 plus 6′ tables.
• At least one separate meeting room, ideally two.
• Cooking facilities.
• Disabled access.
• Car parking.
• We can hold the afterparty there (outside perhaps) or very close by.

A pretty tall order but let us know if anything comes to mind.

Solid

The DRB Collective.

Celebrating the radical, revolutionary life of Claudia Jones

gal-dem

Lola Olufemi pays tribute to the journalist and activist in this foreword to the newly republished Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile by Marika Sherwood

Too often, a revolutionary life appears free of tedium. Revolutionaries emerge from whatever page or screen we discover them on seemingly fully formed. Their lives unfold as a series of events that continually evidence an iron-clad political commitment to building a liveable world and securing freedom for all oppressed people. Because of this romanticised picture, the gulf between our lives and theirs expands. It is hard to imagine that they ever really existed at all – harder still to grapple with the true complexity of that existence. They remain ghosts, die righteous, too soon or vindicated. 

In an effort to recover them,

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Press Release: Anarchist Think Tank Locked Out of PayPal

Wessex Solidarity

Center for a Stateless Society

UPDATE – 9/25/2021

PayPal has gotten back to us. We’re unable to ever use PayPal again.

The reason given by a customer service rep was that “…your account is too much of a risk to continue a relationship with PayPal. This decision is final and irrevocable.” No further information was given and we were told no more information will be forthcoming about what “risk” was posed or what triggered this decision.

We will be able to withdraw the funds that are currently in PayPal accounts after 180 days, if PayPal determines that we don’t owe any of that to third parties. We don’t owe any of this to third parties, but of course it’s worrying given the lack of transparency so far that they could just make something up and keep it.

We’re still trying to figure out how to move forward but, in the…

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KSL REVIEW + BULLETIN

TYNESIDE ANARCHIST ARCHIVE

Our good friends at the Kate Sharpley Library have reviewed Anarchism in North East England 1882-1992 for their Bulletin number 103 which is available as a PDF document via their website here.. https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/2281s4 and what a site it is with lots to explore…

Anarchism in North East England 1882-1992 [review]

This is a big book, but don’t let that put you off, it’s a great piece of history from below. The work that has gone into it is animated by the Archivist’s passion for the subject. They are intent on giving ‘a voice to the voiceless’, to anarchists who are often written out of history (even what passes for anarchist history!): ‘for the first time, this history records what they were actually speaking about at open air meetings, what they were saying during lectures, and what they were actually writing about at the time, hence long sections of the book…

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Issue 3 of No More City

No More City

Our third issue (Spring/Summer 2021) is out now! Check it out in our archive.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa……………..

Sabotage and Strike!: Review of Breaking Things at Work by Gavin Mueller

Ancillary Review of Books
Madi Simcock-Brown

With an issue as central and controversial within left political thought as work, it can often feel like nothing truly new is being said. Indeed, the labor question could be thought of as the ur-question of left-wing politics. In such a predicament, one option is not to attempt anything new per se, but rather to look to the past for inspiration. This is the central achievement of Gavin Mueller in Breaking Things at Work, who finds inspiration in the actions of the Luddites and those he identifies as their political descendants.

This book is far from a bland or abstract treatise. Mueller presents his arguments with rich historical research of a trail of labor movements concerned with resistance to technology and acts of sabotage. Mueller reveals a history of sometimes spontaneous, mostly autonomous movements reacting to increasing mechanization and automation of workplaces—from factories and docks to the first computers and beyond. Despite trade unions and political thinkers’ support for (or at least ambivalence towards) new technologies, this history is one of technology’s devastating transformation or outright destruction of workplaces, workers, and communities.

Breaking Things at Work is for anyone who has breathed a sigh of relief

See Review

Gerrard Winstanley on Power – Real and Imagined

Robert Graham's Anarchism Weblog

Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676) first began publishing radical religious pamphlets in 1648, during the latter half of the English Revolution and Civil Wars. In January 1649, around the time of the execution of Charles I by the English Parliament, he published his first explicitly political pamphlet, The New Law of Righteousness (excerpted in Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas). A few months later, he put his ideas into action. He and a group of like-minded people, who came to be called the Diggers, sought to reclaim “waste” (unoccupied) lands at St. George’s Hill in Surrey, England, and to create an agrarian, libertarian communist settlement. They were eventually run out of the area by hostile land owners, moving to Cobham Heath, where they were able to maintain a new settlement until they were again run off the land in April 1650. About a month beforehand,, Winstanley…

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15th NYC Anarchist Bookfair Will Be in Person & Virtual

NYC Anarchist Bookfair.

New York City. BOOK FAIR and Art Festival in person on Saturday, October 2 at La Plaza Community Garden [East 9th St with Ave C/ East Village, New York, NY – Manhattan]

BOOKFAIR from 11 am to 7 pm

ART FESTIVAL from 3 pm to 7 pm

for an awesome exhibit of anarchist cultural materials plus festivities, from films, books, and zines, to art, performances, and bikes .

Emma Goldman Film Festival Saturday October 2  7:30pm – 10pm at Tompkins Square Park [ East 10th St, New York, NY]

Join us online the following day, Sunday October 3, for virtual workshops, presentations, and panel discussions featuring anarchist writers, activists, and artists. The virtual book fair is organized by Kuñangue Aty Guasu – Assembly of Guarani and Kaiowa Indigenous Women Brasil [www.kunangue.com], with translation in English, Spanish and Portuguese, supported by the University College London Multimedia Anthropology Laboratory (UCL MAL) [www.uclmal.com] London]

Our main concept this year will be Zero Money = Live in Mutual Aid

More Information: NYC Anarchist Bookfair.

We spectated $75.000 but we got $320.000 and $150.000 was to APIB [ Brazil’s Indigenous People Articulation ] and $170.000 – was to Kuñangue Aty Guasu – Assembly of Guarani and Kaiowa Indigenous Women = This was a really successful campaign. Then other campaign that also was successful : was Support anarchist firefighters fighting forest fires in Brazil https://www.firefund.net/urutau We spectated $3000 and we got $3600 [Thanks everybody that collaborated with Brazilian anarchist Firefighters / they will be at the book fair this year with a workshop].

Workshop with Silvia Federici https://anarchistbookfair.net/events/silvia-federici-talk-and-discussion/

Review: The Operating System by Eric Laursen

C4SS – Kevin Carson.

Eric Laursen. The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State. Foreword by Maia Ramnath (AK Press, 2021).

Much of the ground Laursen covers in this book is already familiar to most anarchists. He does an adequate job, or better, at all of it. His treatment of the ideological hegemony of the state is exceptional, and deserves to be read alongside thinkers like Chomsky and Hermann.

But what stands out by far — and the focus of this review — is his central thesis of the state as operating system, and the related ideas he develops from it.

The state, he argues, is both a set of relationships, and a structure controlled by particular groups. In regard to the former:

Marx defined the groupings that control the State too narrowly, denying that the State has any “will” or trajectory of its own. Kropotkin, likewise, failed to see the State as more than just the sum total of the selfish interests behind it.

Any theory of the state that focuses on one of these aspects to the neglect of the other will be unsatisfactory.

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OUR F***ING HISTORY….

TYNESIDE ANARCHIST ARCHIVE

Shunned by ‘academia’, largely ignored by those who put themselves of pedestals of importance in the capital, delibratley written out of some recent ‘histories’ by ‘anarchist historians’ !, treat with ‘aghast’ that local ‘radical celebrity’s’ were not ‘consulted’ during the writing, brushed off from local Labour History society’s radar’s, even blatantly ignored by certain ‘important evangelic sects’ or the ‘vanguard’ that claim to be local anarchists etc etc etc blah blah blah..not as though we care about such things in our daily struggle to survive life itself.

It is both humbling and inspiring to read the kind words expressed from, in our opinion, those at the forefront of the struggle that matters, those who are on our ‘wave length’, those who belong and are from where we belong and are from. Those who we wrote the book Anarchism In North East England 1882-1992 for – our history, our untold story.

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PDF,EN: Issue 7 / Year 3 / April 2021 CONFRONTACIÓN Irregular anarchist publication / Chilean region

Act for freedom now!

PDF EN: