A message from the collective – venue required!

Dear Comrades,

We are still looking for a suitable venue for this 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.

SPIRIT OF REVOLT – INTERVIEW

TYNESIDE ANARCHIST ARCHIVE

As part of a series of upcoming interviews with similar minded endeavors we decided to interview our friends from SPIRIT OF REVOLT – Archives of dissent • Glasgow • Scotland • The Archive collects, manages and preserves multi-media records from Glasgow’s and Clydeside’s anarchist and libertarian-socialist past and present. 

1. Please give everyone a brief history and tell us a bit about yourself.

J – Now 88 been an anarchist since my apprenticeship in Fairfields shipyard on the Clyde. Spent 12 years or so with Amnesty international, the last 3 as urgent action co-ordinator for Scotland. Another 10 years or so with Scottish Association for Care and Resettlement of Offenders, (SACRO). Since 2003 have produced a free newspaper, The Anarchist Critic and pounded the streets of Glasgow distributing the paper, Created the wiki, Strugglepedia and produced the book Radical Glasgow, now in its 4th edition. Promoted the idea of anarchist archive for Glasgow/Clydeside and…

View original post 1,337 more words

Fire Ant: Anarchist Prisoner Solidarity #12

[PDF for printing]

Fire Ant is a quarterly publication focused on spreading the words of anarchist prisoners and generating material solidarity for our imprisoned friends. Begun as a collaboration between anarchist prisoners and anarchists in Maine, Fire Ant seeks to raise material aid for anarchist prisoners while fostering communication between anarchists on both sides of the walls.

Issue #12 features an update from Sean Swain, Michael Kimble on Black history and his parole hearing, letters and essays from Thomas Meyer-Falk, and a letter from Comrade Z.

Trials, May Day, bookfairs and more: late April/early May round-up

Cautiously pessimistic

There’s an awful lot going on, here’s a very quick round-up of a few upcoming events:

Saturday 23rd sees an antifascist callout against the “North East Frontline Patriots” in Newcastle, and a public meeting with Bristol Anarchist Black Cross, Bristol Defendant Solidarity and Bristol Anti-Repression Campaign about the continuing impact of the Kill the Bill cases there. 

On Monday 25th, five people from the Palestine Action campaign are appearing at Southwark Crown Court for alleged direct actions against the arms dealer Elbit, and the RMT are holding a mass meeting in Manchester as part of their national campaign over rail jobs, pay and conditions.

On Tuesday 26th, there’s an RMT meeting in Liverpool as part of the same campaign, and a call for people to turn up to court in Bristol as the next Kill the Bill defendant faces trial. 

International Workers’ Memorial Day…

View original post 272 more words

The Jackdaw Flies! Issue No 11 now out!

Anarchist Communist Group.

Number 11 of Jackdaw, the free newssheet of the Anarchist Communist Group, is now out. Get your copy from your local radical bookshop or order from our website. Better still, help distribute Jackdaw by taking a bundle.

Or, if you can’t wait and want to see the online version, here it is:

Jackdaw-11-web

4th Bristol Radical History Festival – M Shed – Sat 14 May

Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG)

This year’s Bristol Radical History Festival will take place at M Shed from 10.00am to 4.30pm. The two main themes are:

• State and private surveillance of labour and social movements (1792 – now)
• Hidden histories of post-war Britain (1945-51)

Along with history talks and panels, there will be history walks, exhibitions, films, bookstalls and performances.

More details here.

The Solutions are Already Here. Strategies of Ecological Revolution from Below By Peter Gelderloos

Obtain the book from Firestorm Co-op.

Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues that international governmental responses to the climate emergency are structurally incapable of solving the crisis. But there is hope. Across the world, grassroots networks of local communities are working to realize their visions of an alternative revolutionary response to planetary destruction, often pitted against the new megaprojects promoted by greenwashed alternative energy infrastructures and the neocolonialist, technocratic policies that are the forerunners of the Green New Deal. Gelderloos interviews food sovereignty activists in Venezuela, Indigenous communities reforesting their lands in Brazil and anarchists fighting biofuel plantations in Indonesia, looking at the battles that have cancelled airports, stopped pipelines, and helped the most marginalized to fight borders and environmental racism, to transform their cities, to win a dignified survival.

Two reviews of We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post War Britain, by Daniel Sonabend.

AWSM

Click to purchase from Verso Books

Fascism in its original manifestations didn’t come to power throughout Europe. There are many reasons why. One in the case of Britain is that there was a strong anti-fascist movement which helped beat them back. That the 1930s’ and 40s’ has been the main focus of attention among those studying the phenomenon is to be expected. That’s when Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany were in power. They had contact with sympathisers such as the British Union of Fascists (BUF) headed by the renegade aristocrat Oswald Mosley. By wars end, Europe was destroyed and millions of dead attested to the political bankruptcy of the fascist project. Yet supporters of Mosley began to regroup surprisingly soon after the collapse. ‘We Fight Fascists’ by Daniel Sonabend, looks at this lesser known period.

Daniel Sonabend was minding his own business when he received a call from a friend. The friend had just finished watching a documentary about the famous hair stylist Vidal Sassoon. Daniel is bald so he wondered why he was being told about this. It turned out that in his youth the Jewish Sassoon had been a member of an organisation called the ‘43 Group’. Between 1946-50 they had taken a militant stance of actively combatting neo-fascists on the streets of London and yet Daniel was both surprised not to have heard of the group and intrigued to learn more. Thus he embarked on 6 years of research that included checking archives and interviewing participants. The result is this book

Read more

0161 Festival.

Daniel Sonabend’s book “We Fight Fascists” tells the story of the 43 Group and discusses the early days of organised resistance to fascism that emerged in the crucible of Post War London. The 43 group were a motley crew of Jewish ex servicemen and women who, upon returning home to Britain after World War 2 soon realised that the threat of fascism had not been entirely crushed with the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. Despite the outcome of World War 2 a year or so earlier, the British fascists that hid out during conflict crawled out of the woodwork and were soon blatant in their xenophobic and anti Semitic street level proselytising. Oswald Mosley and his assorted cronies and rabble rousers were putting in the graft to gain some traction amongst the white working class by whipping up hostility against Jews and other immigrants, all sounds a bit familiar doesn’t it? It should come as no surprise that the authorities and their cronies in the constabulary and even organised Jewry did nothing to oppose Mosley whilst ignoring the warning signs creating a situation not unlike that of Germany in 1933.

The 43 group (named after the number of members present at the first meeting) pulled together to confront Mosley’s Blackshirts in the streets and alleyways of East End London. Frustrated by the lack of decisive action and apathy from the authorities, they formed as a response and using their philosophy of Discuss, Decide, Do It very quickly demonstrated that the extreme right were not going to be allowed to stroll around without a fight.

Read more.

Kropotkin & The Channel Islands

TYNESIDE ANARCHIST ARCHIVE

Here is a rare, recently donated, not often seen little pamphlet – ‘Prince Peter Kropotkin and The Channel Islands’ Guernsey Historical Monograph No. 19. Toucan press. 1979.

As the author states, Kropotkin “visited the Channel Islands on at least three occasions during his exile in England. he came in 1890, 1896 and 1903. These visits are not mentioned in his autobiography ‘Memoirs of a Revolutionist’ (1899)….More surprising is the failure of these to be noted by his biographers for they appear to have been significant in the development of one line of his thinking” (p5). The same can be said of the numerous visits of Kropotkin to the North East of England. More on this period of Kropotkin’s developing analysis, details of his visits and reproduction of his local lectures can be found in our (still available) recent book ‘Anarchism in North East England 1882 – 1992‘.

View original post 13 more words

HISTORY PAMPHLET OFFER FOR THE MONTH OF APRIL.

Anarchist Communist Group

ALL THESE FOR ONLY £8.00 INC POSTAGE! To pay- go to Paypal and pay londonacg@gmail.com Make sure to give your address! Any problems contact us at londonacg@gmail.com

The Kronstadt Revolt: The flower of the revolution crushed by the Bolsheviks

This new ACG pamphlet has been published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Kronstadt uprising of revolutionary sailors and workers against the Bolshevik tyranny of Lenin and Trotsky. This edition contains Ante Ciliga’s The Kronstadt Revolt, Nestor Makhno’s In Memory of the Kronstadt Revolt, poems by Kenneth Rexroth and Tuli Kupferberg, and of course, the words of the Kronstadters themselves.

Normally £2.00

The Italian Factory Councils and the Anarchists

The history of the Italian factory councils of 1920-1921 deserves to be more widely known outside academic circles and revolutionary groups. That’s why we have brought out this cheap pamphlet. We believe that the events surrounding the factory councils should be highlighted for a number of reasons. They point to alternative forms of organisation that appear at times of revolutionary ferment and Outside of Turin the movement was predominantly driven by Anarchists and Anarcho-syndicalists – something which our “friends” the Leninists don’t want you to know about.

Normally £2.50

Towards A Fresh Revolution – The Friends of Durruti

The May Days in Barcelona 1937 brought the Friends of Durruti group to the fore as they fought to save the Spanish revolution from the attacks of the Stalinists and the “anarchist “ ministers. This pamphlet includes important texts from the Friends of Durruti as well as an examination of their ideas and a look at their membership.

“The Friends of Durruti’s analyses…link up with what could be described as the libertarian communist pole in the realisation of a need for a specific revolutionary organisation, developing a theory and programme. The balance sheet is by and large positive-the Friends represent an important moment in the construction of libertarian communism”.

Normally £3.00

The Wilhelmshaven Revolt:

a Chapter of the Revolutionary Movement in the German Navy 1918-1919 by ‘Ikarus’ (Ernst Schneider)

Republished by the ACG in the centenary year of the ending of World War 1, this pamphlet looks at a lesser known moment in revolutionary working class history which took place at that time. The events in Germany during 1918-1919 were arguably an example of our class at its most revolutionary.

Written from the viewpoint of someone involved in those revolutionary events, The Wilhelmshaven Revolt is an inspiring read, particularly in this current period of low class-consciousness and low working class activity. It not only shows us what is possible but what to avoid, namely, trust in reformist politicians and those who seek to act in the name of the working class with statist and Leninist “solutions”.

Illustrated, 43 pages, with a foreword by the ACG, an introduction by Nick Heath and appendices by Joe Thomas, Dave Graham and Mat Kavanagh.

Normally £3

ALL FOR JUST £8! HURRY, OFFER ENDS ON APRIL 30th

Book “Rojava: People in Arms” by RiseuUp4Rojava

Internationalist Commune

In this book you will find interviews with people from different places and fields of work in the revolution in Rojava.

They give an insight into the reality, difficulties and achievements of the revolution in Rojava.

We are very happy to share this document about the historical resistance of the people of Northern and Eastern Syria. You can download it here. If you want to print it and you want to have high-quality version, then contact riseup4rojava [at] riseup.net