HE WAS AN ANARCHIST, AGITATOR AND JOURNALIST WHO WENT TO MEXICO TO DOCUMENT PEASANT REVOLT — AND HE ENDED UP FILMING HIS OWN DEATH

The Martyrdom of Brad Will

Even before he was killed by a Mexican policeman’s bullet, Brad Will seemed to those who revered him more like a symbol—a living folk song, or a murder ballad—than like a man. This is what the thirty-six-year-old anarchist-journalist’s friends remember: tall, skinny Brad in a black hoodie with two fists to the sky, Rocky-style, atop an East Village squat as the wrecking ball swings; Brad, his bike hoisted on his shoulder, making a getaway from cops across the rooftops of taxicabs; Brad, locked down at City Hall disguised as a giant sunflower with patched-together glasses to protest the destruction of New York’s guerrilla gardens. Brad (he rarely used his surname, kept it secret in case you were a cop) wore his long brown hair tied up in a knot, but for the right woman—and a lot of women seemed right to Brad—he’d let it sweep down his back almost to his ass. Jessica Lee, one of the few who spurned him, met Brad at an Earth First! action in southwestern Virginia the summer before he was killed. They skipped away from the crowd to a waterfall where Brad stripped naked and invited Lee in her swimsuit to stand with him behind sheets of cascading water. He tried to kiss her, but she turned away. She thought there was something missing inside him. “Like he was incomplete, too lonely,” she says. Maybe he was just tired after a decade and a half on the front lines of a revolution that never quite happened.

This pamphlet groups together the most recent translation of the Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft) and the debates between its authors, Malatesta and other anarchists that followed in the immediate years after its publication. The platform has always been a controversial document within anarchism, we introduce some of the history of the early controversies.

The 10,000 year story of Western civilization’s decline into economic enslavement and institutionalized mass murder at the hands of those elite who have used positions of power in religious and political institutions to systematically extract wealth from the populace and eliminate anyone who resisted.

Section 1) Introduction

Fish would be the last to discover water, and nowhere is this concept more true than in the analysis of human history. Discovering a historical perspective that is at the same time simple, profound, and extremely controversial is difficult. But this story is written to those who recognize the simple truth when they see it. And it is meant to be both an explanation of our current situation but more importantly and explanation of why it seems almost impossible to do anything about it.

Martha Goldsmith Scara may be the last anarchist in Piscataway.

More than 80 years ago, her parents traveled Stelton Road to reach the Modern School Ferrer Colony, a rural community inspired by the teachings of Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer y Guardia.

Scara is the last student still living in the former colony, which gained fame and infamy for its mélange of left-wing thought and the Modern School's radical approach to education: putting children in control of their own schooling.

Li Yaotang, whose courtesy name was Li Feigan, was a Chinese novelist, short story writer, essayist, translator and intellectual who wrote under the pseudonym Pa Chin (also Ba Jin) taken from the Chinese transliterations of the first syllable of Mikhail A. Bakunin and the last of Peter A. Kropotkin, both Russian anarchists he admired.

Pa Chin was born in 1904 into a wealthy family in Chengdu, capital of southwest China’s Szechuan province. After his parents died when he was 12, family authority passed to his despotic grandfather, who forbade him from entering a modern school.

Family feuding broke out in 1917 when Pa Chin’s grandfather died and authority transferred to an elder uncle.

Anarchism is today finally emerging out of its long held position as ‘the conscience of the workers’ movement’, as the eternal critic of Leninism and state centred politics. It long took the side of the working class against the Party, a position Lenin mocked when he wrote: “The mere presentation of the question—"dictatorship of the party or dictatorship of the class(1); dictatorship (party) of the leaders, or dictatorship (party) of the masses?"—testifies to most incredibly and hopelessly muddled thinking....to contrast, in general, the dictatorship of the masses with a dictatorship of the leaders is ridiculously absurd, and stupid.”(2) Interestingly this was not written about anarchists, but rather about the position held by a Dutch-German Marxist tendency that was part of the Comintern. This tendency and others comprise what is known as ‘left-communism’.

There has long been a close relationship between anarchism and left-communism, as left-communism took up many of the positions held by anarchists. The Dutch-German left developed positions that are indistinguishable from those that have long been found within the anarchist movement. While anarchism influenced left-communism in practice(3), left-communism and Marxist tendencies closely related to it have been a major theoretical influence on anarchism, in particular over the last thirty years.

Elisée Reclus’ extraordinary intellectual, geographical, and revolutionary odyssey took
him to many countries, inspired him to produce the world's most extensive body
of geographical writing, and enabled him to discuss humanity's relationship to
nature and society in innovative ways that are still of vital relevance today.

On the Bolshevik Myth

I always have mixed feelings when I see Leninists attack anarchism in their press. On the one hand, I despair as I know they will waste a lot of space getting it wrong. And that a lot of time will be required to correct the errors, distortions and stupidities they inflict on the world (as I have already done in " An Anarchist FAQ"). I also feel hope as it shows that anarchism is growing so much that they feel they have to spend time attacking us. We have three classic examples of this in International Socialist Review issue no. 53.

For some reason, while attacking anarchists and anarchism Marxists feel they have to take our best ideas, experiments and activists. Often they discuss anarchist activists and strangely fail to mention they were anarchists. Louise Michel has suffered this fate, as have the Haymarket Martyrs. The latter have now suffered an even worse fate, with an academic, James Green, trying to appropriate them for Marxism!

The other day our ship, the Esperanza passed near the island of Sonsorol, one of the sixteen states of the Republic of Palau. But when we say "near" it's very relative - the ocean is a very very big place, and we didn't actually see it. Still, Sonsorol was there, just a tiny dot in the chart, so small. It could have been just a rock. But it is also the place of an utopian anarchist dream.

Some years ago, an article called Visit Port Watson!, a sort of tourist guide about the perfect lawless society on Sonsorol, was published in a book called Semiotext(e) SF. The article would have you believe that Sonsorol was a sizeable place, a pirate enclave with towns and farms where anyone could go and live, with all sorts of interesting ways of conducting an anarchist lifestyle (in the sense of personal freedom, rather than disorder). Alas, this Sonsorol dream isn't quite the same as reality.*

For over half a century, this three block stretch of E.8th St has exemplified the East Village's reputation as a counterculture and artistic haven. It has become tradition for punk rockers, performance artists, street musicians, activists, hippies, squatters, and people watchers to congregate here. Even though the landscape had changed quite dramatically, (your now more likely to see students, young professionals and tourists), St. Marks Place still hosts an edge that is unique to the rest of NYC.

Soon after World War II ended, groups of artists and intellectuals began moving to New York City from all over America, in search of an alternative to small town life and mainstream culture. Many arrived to attend local universities like NYU and Columbia University; some just wanted something more, something different. Back then the East Village was still called "The Lower East Side" and were still considered slums, so these students were originally attracted by the cheap rents. They also found that they fit in well with the rooted community of anarchists, communists, and general anti-establishment folk who paved the way for radical politics and ideals carried over via recent immigration from Europe.