Written to mark the 100th anniversary of Kropotkin’s death. It appeared in Anarcho-Syndicalist Review No. 83 (Summer 2021)
(more…)Category: Anarchist History
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Review: Divide and Conquer or Divide and Subdivide?
A review of a pamphlet on the lessons of the First International written by Mark Leier whose excellent biography of Bakunin is recommended.
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Now and After
This is a write up of a talk I gave in Glasgow in 2018 entitled Now and After: What would Anarchy be like and how we create the new world by fighting the current one. It summarises anarchist ideas of what a free society would be like and how we get there. As with my previous write-ups, this reflects more what I intended to say rather than what was said. Hopefully it will be close enough. For more details of the ideas raised here, see Section I of An Anarchist FAQ.
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Voltairine De Cleyre: Her revolutionary ideas and legacy
A review and evaluation of Voltairine De Cleyre’s politics, showing why modern radicals would gain from reading her. It uses three recently published books of her writings to discuss her ideas and their evolution from an individual to a communist anarchist and how it related to changes in North American anarchism. An important figure in Anarchist history whose ideas are of interest today, particularly as we still suffer from the patriarchy, capitalism and statism she opposed.
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Louise Michel: “If you are not cowards, kill me!”
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A review of a book on that remarkable anarchist activist, Louise Michel. Sadly marred by an obvious, and utterly unnecessary, bias for Marxism, it fails to do justice to her ideas and her life.