Anarchism and Divisions in our Class

Author: Chekov Feeney

PDF file size: 692 KB

There are many irrational beliefs held by sections of our class which act against our objective interests, that is to say that they hinder us from uniting against our common enemy, the bosses, our exploiters and oppressors. Sexism, racism, religious sectarianism and what the imperialists call ‘tribalism’ are prejudices which are held by significant numbers of our class throughout the world. To state that they exist is to state an obvious fact, like stating 2+2=4. Everybody knows they exist, save perhaps a tiny number of deranged individuals with a tenuous connection to reality. It is neither useful nor original to state their existance, what is useful is to ask why they exist…

Complex Everyday Realities: Women and Class

Oct1

Author: Hana Plant

PDF file size: 255 KB

“I write this story to build connections between class struggle and feminism, so that the lives of working class women are illuminated, part of the political framework. … To me, the famed feminist saying ‘the personal is political’ is not so much about changing our own lives to change the world, but a theoretical framework that affirms the value of our stories and uses the patterns between them as a basis for solidarity…”

Concentric Circles: The Especifsta Concept of Concentric Circles in Anarchist Organisation

Jun1

Author: Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro – FARJ

English Translation: Jonathan Payn of the ZACF

PDF file size: 295 KB

The specific anarchist organisation uses, both for its internal and external functioning, the logic of what we call “concentric circles” – strongly inspired by the Bakuninist organisational model. The main reason that we adopt this logic of functioning is because, for us, the anarchist organisation needs topreserve different instances of action. These different instances should strengthen its work while at the same time allowing it to bring together prepared militants with a high level of commitment and approximating people sympathetic to the theory or practice of the organisation – who could be more or less prepared and more or less committed. In short, the concentric circles seek to resolve an important paradox: the anarchist organisation needs to be closed enough to have prepared, committed and politically aligned militants, and open enough to draw in new militants. …

Weakening the Dam

May24

Author: Twin Cities IWW

PDF file size: 350 KB

A pamphlet put out by the Twin Cities IWW branch for the purpose of promoting the development of workplace organisers, based on their experiences of organising at work. It offers the sort of practical advice we could all be implementing in our own workplaces.

[Leaflet] Statement on the Informal Anarchist Federation and terrorist tactics

May22

Author: Anarchist Federation (England, Wales and Scotland)

PDF file size: 42.1 KB

On the 11th of May Roberto Adinolfi, CEO of an Italian state controlled nuclear engineering company, was shot and wounded. A cell of the insurrectionist Informal Anarchist Federation have claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement, saying that it was an act of vengeance for deaths and environmental damage caused by the nuclear industry. Previous acts claimed by Informal Anarchist Federation cells include sending a letter bomb to the Italian tax collection office, almost blinding a worker at the office and risking the lives of the postal and clerical workers who unwittingly carried the bomb. …

The Workers’ Committee: An Outline of its Principles and Structure

Mar22

Author: J.T. Murphy

File size: 1.53 MB

“We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them. Being composed of delegates from every shop and untrammelled by obsolete law or rule, we claim to represent the true feeling of the workers. We can act immediately according to the merits of the case and the desire of the rank and file”.

This pamphlet was written by J.T.Murphy and published by the Sheffield Workers’ Committee in 1917. It describes the structure of the rank and file workers’ committees that developed during the First World War and proposes co-ordinating them into local and national committees in parallel with the trade unions.

Continue reading →

Social Anarchism and Organisation

Mar20

Author: Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro – FARJ

English Translation: Jonathan Payn of the ZACF

PDF file size: 849 KB

English translation of “Anarquismo Social e Organização”, by the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro (Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro – FARJ), Brazil, approved at the 1st FARJ Congress, held on 30th and 31st of August 2008.

The first Congress of the FARJ was held with the principal objective of deepening our reflections on the question of organisation and formalising them into a programme. This debate has been happening within our organisation since 2003. We have produced theoretical materials, established our thinking, learned from the successes and mistakes of our political practice it was becoming increasingly necessary to further the debate and to formalise it, spreading this knowledge both internally and externally. The document “Social Anarchism and Organisation” formalises our positions after all these reflections. More than a purely theoretical document, it reflects the conclusions realised after five years of practical application of anarchism in the social struggles of our people. The document is divided into 16 parts. It has already been published in Portuguese in a book co-published between Faísca and the FARJ.

Marx’s Economics for Anarchists: An Anarchist’s Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

Jan20

Author: Wayne Price

PDF file size: 491 KB

The world is facing upsetting upheavals, with aspects which are political, military, ecological, cultural, and even spiritual. Clearly this includes a deep economic crisis, overlapping with all other problems. We need to understand the nature of the economic crisis if we are to deal with it.

Of the theories about the economy, the two main schools are bourgeois, in the sense that they advocate capitalism. Both the conservative, monetarist, unrestricted-free-market school and the liberal/social democratic Keynesian school exist to justify capitalism and to advise the government how to manage the capitalist economy….

“The transcripts of the 2006 meetings [of the governors of the Federal Reserve Board and the presidents of the 19 regional banks]… clearly show some of the nation’s pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with sheparding. The problem was not a lack of information; it was a lack of comprehension, born in part of their deep confidence in economic forecasting models that turned out to be broken.”

NY Times (January 13, 2012); p. A3.

This essay can also be downloaded as a PDF with flowing text here

Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

Jan20

Authors: Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English

PDF file size: 817 KB

Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of western history. They were abortionists, nurses and counsellors. They were pharmacists, cultivating healing herbs and exchanging the secrets of their uses. They were midwives, travelling from home to home and village to village. For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbour to neighbour and mother to daughter. They were called “wise women” by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.

Today, however, health care is the property of male professionals. Ninety-three percent of the doctors in the US are men; and almost all the top directors and administrators of health institutions. Women are still in the overall majority — 70 percent of health workers are women — but we have been incorporated as workers into an industry where the bosses are men. We are no longer independent practitioners, known by our own names, for our own work. We are, for the most part, institutional fixtures, filling faceless job slots: clerk, dietary aide, technician, maid….

“To know our history is to begin to see how
to take up the struggle again!”

An Anarchist Society

Jan20

Author: Pyotr Kropotkin

PDF file size: 171 KB

[A] variety of considerations, historical, ethnological, and economic, have brought the Anarchists to conceive a society very different from what is considered as its ideal by the authoritarian political parties. The Anarchists conceive a society in which all the mutual relations of its members are regulated, not by laws, not by authorities, whether self-imposed or elected, but by mutual agreements between the members of that society and by a sum of social customs and habits — not petrified by law, routine, or superstition, but continually developing and continually readjusted, in accordance with the ever-growing requirements of a free life, stimulated by the progress of science, invention, and the steady growth of higher ideals.

No ruling authorities, then. No government of man by man; no crystallisation and immobility, but a continual evolution — such as we see in Nature. Free play for the individual, for the full development of his individual gifts — for his individualisation. In other words, no actions are imposed upon the individual by a fear of punishment; none is required from him by society, but those which receive his free acceptance. In a society of equals this would be quite sufficient for preventing those unsociable actions that might be harmful to other individuals and to society itself, and for favouring the steady moral growth of that society…

Anarchism, Racism and the Class Struggle

Nov30

Author: Workers’ Solidarity Federation [South Africa]

PDF file size: 289 KB

Racial oppression remains a defining feature of the modern capitalist world. It is manifest most spectacularly in violent attacks on immigrants and minorities by fascist gangs. More important to the fate of these communities has been the systematic and increasing discrimination by capitalist states, manifest in attacks on the rights of immigrants, cuts in welfare services, and racist police and court systems.

This pamphlet shows how capitalism gave birth to racism; how racism is the enemy of all working and poor people; it describes how racism can and must be fought; and what the role of anarchists in that fight should be…

Against the Racist Delirium

Nov29

Author: Camillo Berneri

PDF file size: 305 KB

Fascism, the triumph of the irrational, has taken the most discredited myths of pre-scientific ethnology to its bosom. … “The age of ‘pure reason’, of ‘science for the sake of science’, of ‘disinterested science’, is over. Any science that has an active contribution to make towards a broad objective becomes political, and thus, like politics, has its principles and its accomplishments alike, imbued with racism, nationalism and National Socialism.” … It is absolutely plain from the racist delirium (an out-and-out collective psychosis) that Hitlerism represents a great eclipse of German intellect and culture. On 25 March 1933, Goering, the then Reich minister of the Interior, told foreign press representatives: “Plainly, anti-semitism is part of the official program of the National Socialist Party and the manner in which the latter has moulded its storm troops makes it plain that today every member of the storm troops looks at Professor Einstein with a feeling of racial superiority.”

The World Crisis and an Anarchist Response

Sep28

Author: Wayne Price

PDF file size: 263 KB

Facing an economic crisis of world historical proportions, the worst since the Great Depression, the United States has already responded with striking political changes, particularly the election of the first African-American president. What is likely to happen in the future and what should be the response of revolutionary class-struggle anarchists?… Economically, what has begun is either a deep, lengthy, world-wide, recession — or a collapse into a second Great Depression, possibly worse than the first. Either way, large numbers of workers and their families are suffering and will face more suffering, from unemployment, under-employment, losses of their homes, the loss of the equity they had in their homes, and an inability to afford healthcare (a life and death matter)….

Anarcho-Syndicalism, Technology and Ecology

Sep27

Author: Graham Purchase

PDF file size: 219 KB

In an anarchist society, the absence of centralised state authority will permit a radically new integration of nature, labour and culture. As the social and ecological revolution progresses, national boundaries will become cartographical curiosities, and divisions based upon differences in geography, climate and species distribution will re-emerge. This essay addresses the question of what role unionism will play in these changes.

Zabalaza Books

"Knowledge is the key to be free!"

Author Archives:

Anarchism and Divisions in our Class

Complex Everyday Realities: Women and Class

Concentric Circles: The Especifsta Concept of Concentric Circles in Anarchist Organisation

Weakening the Dam

[Leaflet] Statement on the Informal Anarchist Federation and terrorist tactics

The Workers’ Committee: An Outline of its Principles and Structure

Social Anarchism and Organisation

Marx’s Economics for Anarchists: An Anarchist’s Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

An Anarchist Society

Anarchism, Racism and the Class Struggle

Against the Racist Delirium

The World Crisis and an Anarchist Response

Anarcho-Syndicalism, Technology and Ecology

Follow “Zabalaza Books”