Taken from Animal Issue 1 – 1997
Libertarian socialism has many different interpretations, but it’s primary meaning is found in opposition to a range of bureaucratic tendencies within a hierarchical society to seek ever increasing levels of control over work, social life, and personal relationships. For the purpose of this exposition the term ‘bureaucracy’ refers to a range of institutional arrangements by which a dominant stratum, the state, or the slick operators of the market, seek greater control over people’s objectives, where people are treated as means or instruments whose own objectives are regarded as insignificant.
Taken from Animal Issue 1 -1997 
Taken from Animal Issue 1 -1997
From Animal Issue 1 – 1997
BASH THE RICH BASTARDS – BUT FIRST, WHERE’S MY PINT
The 126th Durham Miners Gala takes place in Durham on July 10th. The worlds largest annual gathering of workers is a splendid family event with stalls, food, drink, fairground and more. The march features approx 80 Miners banners and bands, and starts at 9am in the city centre and proceeds to the Racecourse by the river. Last year the march took 6 hours! Many stop for food and drinks along the way, and to listen to the many bands. This year Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn are among the speakers from the Trade Union movement.
Class War Classix has published J. T. Murphy’s great contribution to the working class movement because the issues are as relevant as ever. Born in 1888 he was 29 when he wrote this pamphlet, working in Vickers, Brightside 1902-1918. He was a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, the chief craft union in the industry. Originally intending to enter the Civil Service family commitments meant he stayed in engineering, where he was to read Marx, Connolly and others for hours at a time whilst turning propeller shafts and gun barrels at work. The large factory effectively hid him from the gaze of foreman supervisor who walked the centre of the shop.
Beer, BBQ and books at one of Sunderland’s best pubs!
Thompson saw active service during World War 2, and this was to be integral to his later thought. His scarred memories were in the place between necessity and desire, where human agency found a resting place of honour, however diminished by later events and machinations; “We were disgusted by war but we assented to its political necessity, a necessity which might – Although we hoped most ardently that it would not – entail our own deaths’.
There are 2 poles of anarchism, which deserve criticism; one of the saddest things about ‘fashionable anarchism’ is that it tries ‘the most radical gesture’, or sometimes judges on supposed fashion/relevance, and ‘respectable’ ‘opinion’. This was and is very largely true of the old guard leaderships and wannabe followers of an imaginary respectable holy grail. There are those ‘melancholy realists’ too, who never escape from bulletin boards, who write nothing which is published, nor do they participate in any serious politics beyond the web, who police the rest of contributors with their self appointed and self referential holier than thou attitudes. Their ultra leftism paralyses them into inaction. They must be; got around, ignored, or usurped, if politics is to develop more naturally in the 21st century. So here is a reply to issues such as these, it is necessarily ‘unfinished business’ and this is borrowing very heavily from the tradition that Class War originated in and developed with, and that is in the work of E.P. Thompson. Whose classic “The Making of the English working class” is probably the most, or amongst the most influential history books in the world.
