Category Archives: Commentary

Through war, despotism and social change: Russia’s Anarchist Black Cross

From avtonom.org and Freedom News (30/08/2024). For this year’s International Anarchist Prisoner Solidarity Week, Freedom interviewed the Anarchist Black Cross-Moscow to discuss their long history in Russia supporting imprisoned Russian anarchists, the challenges they face under Putin’s regime and their work during the … Continue reading

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Colin Ward and Martin Buber: Society and the State

We return to Colin Ward through the work of Martin Buber, in parallel essays addressing the nature of and the relation between the State and Society. For both authors, the relation between the two – in Buber’s terms, the relation … Continue reading

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Queer Wanderings through the Other Germany and the Anti-Nazi Underworld: An Invocation

From the CrimethInc. collective (19/08/2024). An Invocation The laws targeting queer and trans people that are proliferating across the United States are a symptom of a much deeper and more insidious reaction, the inevitable outgrowth of a deeply repressive and … Continue reading

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Colin Ward: Anarchism as anarchy

The important question is … not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society. Colin Ward, … Continue reading

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Charlottesville, Revisited—2017 to 2024

From the CrimethInc. collective (11/08/2024). What Can a Moment of Peril Tell Us about Our Own Dangerous Times? Seven years ago, anarchists and other anti-fascists converged in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose the “Unite the Right” rally. The organizers of the … Continue reading

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Amedeo Bertolo: An apology for anarchism

In a 1983 article for Volontà that we share below, Amedeo Bertolo endeavoured to critically diagnose the anarchist movement of his time in a remarkably direct and lucid manner; a diagnoses which we may help us to see through our … Continue reading

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Bertolt Brecht: On the Theatricality of Fascism (1939)

Therefore learn how to see and not to gape.To act instead of talking all day long.The world was almost won by such an ape!The nations put him here his kind belong.But don’t rejoice too soon at your escape –The womb … Continue reading

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James Baldwin: The Uses of the Blues

The title “The Uses of the Blues” does not refer to music; I don’t know anything about music. It does refer to the experience of life, or the state of being, out of which the blues come. Now, I am … Continue reading

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For James Baldwin: “Telling it like it is”

If the hope of givingis to love the living,the giver risks madnessin the act of giving. Some such lesson I seemed to seein the faces that surrounded me. Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,what gift would give them the gift to … Continue reading

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For James C. Scott (1936-2024)

… state-ness is not a binary, where something is a state or not a state, but it’s a continuum. So, things that are more a state or less a state. […] My argument would be that when the state has … Continue reading

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