Over 30 years of anarchist writing from Ireland listed under hundreds of topics
The Platform: What's in it?
Date: Fri, 2000-11-10 15:51
About the Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists
Date: Fri, 2000-11-10 15:45
Anarchists are constantly thinking about how society is and how it could be. We strive towards the ideal of a free and democratic society. We know that, in order to get there, it will be necessary to tear down the present authoritarian system of government. Our struggle for freedom throws up many areas of controversy and debate. One of these has always been, and always will be, how do we get to a revolution? How do we organise for change? An important contribution to this debate was the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists*, a document which was written in 1926 by a group of exiled Russian and Ukrainian anarchists, and which still has much to offer to today's debates around the question of organisation.
Review: The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937-1939
Date: Fri, 2000-11-10 15:29
The Friends of Durruti organisation, which arose from the ranks of anarchist militants during the Spanish Civil War, condemned the CNT and FAI members who joined the anti-Franco government. For their pains they were accused of wanting to establish an "anarchist dictatorship". Alan MacSimóin reviews the first English language book about them, and looks at the lessons to be learnt from Spain. The 'Friends of Durruti' appear in just about every book on the Spanish Civil War, especially in relation to the 1937 May Days in Barcelona. They get mentioned but we are told very little about their politics or activities. Some organisations, like the Workers Solidarity Movement, see their political stance as important to the tradition of revolutionary anarchism. Other anarchists, most notably sections of the syndicalist movement, condemn them for 'flirting with Bolshevism/Leninism/Trotskyism' or for 'advocating an anarchist dictatorship'. So who were they, where did they come from, what did they say, and what did they do?
Letters on Cane Nero
Date: Fri, 2000-11-10 13:47
Readers views on some controversy generated with the last issue
Racism and the Class struggle
Date: Fri, 2000-11-10 12:37
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. In this article, the South African anarchist organisation, the WSF, puts forward its view that the fight against racism and the class-struggle are inextricably linked.
Cities of the future?
Date: Fri, 2000-11-10 12:27
Purchase's proposal for more ecologically integrated communities usually meets with most scepticism when it is imagined applied to cities. Even a relatively small city, like Dublin, is almost completely dependent on food from neighbouring regions, and its ecosystem is made up of cars, people and concrete. If a city like New York or Mexico was sealed off from the rest of the world, it would die within days; the only question is whether it would be from starvation or asphyxiation. Given the number of such large cities around the world, and the fact that, even if it were possible, given the size of the earth's population, for everyone to live in small towns and rural communities, many would not want to, how can cities be accommodated within an environmentally sound anarchist society?
Space Aliens horrified by Earth
Date: Tue, 2000-10-17 16:31
An alien spacecraft surveying the earth would surely be astounded by the 'civilisation' that inhabits it. On the one hand it has sent men to the moon and sequenced the human genome. On the other tens of millions die every year because they lack access to basic medicine and clean water. 2.6 billion people have no access to sanitation, 2 billion have no electricity and 100 million are homeless. How can this be?
Is Fight Club an anarchist film?
Date: Tue, 2000-09-19 16:00
At the beginning of Fight Club, the unnamed narrator is cracking up. His job is meaningless, his life is empty, and his attempts to fill it by accumulating stuff - Ikea furniture, Calvin Klein clothes - are failing. His constant travelling, and acute insomnia, mean he's no longer sure where, why, or who he is anymore.
The United Bigots of the Northern Ireland Assembly'
Date: Tue, 2000-09-19 15:57
When the 'Northern Ireland Assembly' discussed the issue of abortion in June, the prospect of denying rights to women united politicians right across the so-called 'religious divide'. The Democratic Unionist Party proposed a motion to prevent the extension of the 1967 Abortion Act to the 6 Counties. The SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party!!) imposed a party whip in favour of the motion.
Thats capitalism - WS60
Date: Tue, 2000-09-19 15:45
Speaking at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Washington, the foreign minister of Brazil lamented that if the next WTO meeting had to be held in an out of the way place, he preferred that it be held on a cruise ship instead of in the middle of the desert. He then gave an impassioned speech in which he opposed writing core labour standards into the WTO agreement and defended child labour. He went on to describe how in one region of Brazil, more than 5,000 children "help their families earn a little extra money" by hauling bags of coal from a dump yard to a steel mill.