Anarchoblogs

[A post prompted by some disco elsewhere on the Internets...] May Day in Melbourne this year (2012) was a small affair — tiny even. Perhaps 30 or 40 people (overwhelmingly male) attended the 8 Hour Monument at midday, and sometime … Continue reading →

We (Food Not Bombs) are getting a new “lunch” truck !! Along with Create A Change – who build gardens in local schools & our friend Shane – Raw Vegan Chef (Ooh Baby I Like It Raw) we will be sharing $50,000 to get this vehicle thanx to Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com & the Downtown Project … some students from Iowa will be helping us this summer to develop a way to best help the community !! Thanx to everyone involved !!

[cross-posted at BHL]

I’ve contributed the opening essay to an exchange on “Gustave de Molinari’s Legacy for Liberty” at Liberty Fund’s new “Liberty Matters” forum.

Responses by Gary Chartier, Matt Zwolinski, David Friedman, and David Hart, and will be forthcoming in a few days, followed by exchange among the five of us.

Thanks to Sheldon Richman for arranging this!

[cross-posted at BHL]

In honour of May Day, the website of the Center for a Stateless Society has just undergone a massive and beautiful redesign.

Here’s how the site looked when C4SS first launched in 2006.

Here’s how it looked last month.

And here’s the C4SS website today. Shiny!

The chief architect of the new site redesign is William Gillis, to whom shukrani sana.

If anyone feels moved to help C4SS out with donations, translations, or our new Into Libraries program, don’t be shy!

Introception: An Introduction to an Introduction

Paul Avrich was and still is a rightfully acclaimed historian of anarchism and for good reason. First beginning with his research of Russia and the time of the USSR he was fascinated by those who stood in opposition to the early rule and especially the anarchists. From there he would explore more specific anarchists such as Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman as well as more obscure foreign anarchists both in America and abroad. One focus of Avrich’s in particular was https://drive.google.com/?tab=wo&authuser=0#folders/0B6Koq2WkUJLWTFZJYzdZUENIZDAthe late 19th century and early 20th century anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, whose biography he wrote in 1978. With this Avrich made one of the most important contributions to researching or understanding Voltairine de Cleyre. Period.

But this was not his only contribution to aiding those of us who want to understand Voltairine de Cleyre. And this series of essays is just one more example of that.

In realizing how passionate Voltairine was about the Haymarket Affair, how important it was to anarchism more broadly and thus how vital a collection of her speeches on that topic would be Avrich compiled them in this collection. Unfortunately though this specific collection (though even there it’ incomplete) is online and several of the essays even have audio recordings via LibriVox recordings, most of these are obscure or not in highly accessible places. I’ve personally attempted to slightly rectify this by posting a few quotes from a few of them online on the Voltairine de Cleyre page on Facebook.

But in an attempt to do much better and much more than this I’ve made this freely available in copy and pastable form on C4SS, on Voltairine’s Facebook page and in my own personal online files so that I can also share them via email or whatever your preference may be.

I hope you’ll enjoy this series as much as I have and shall continued to do so.

Introduction Paul Avrich

The Haymarket affair, one of the most famous incidents in the history of the anarchist movement, began on 3 May 1886, when the Chicago police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing and wounding several men. The following evening, the anarchists held a protest meeting near Haymarket Square. Towards the end of the meeting, which had proceeded without incident, rain began to fall and the crowd started to disperse. The last speaker, Samuel Fielden, was concluding his address when a contingent of police marched in and ordered the meeting to be closed.

Fielden objected that the gathering was peaceful and that he was just finishing up. The police captain insisted. At that moment a bomb was thrown. One policeman was killed and nearly seventy were injured, six of whom later died. The police opened fire on the crowd, killing at least four persons and wounding many more.

Who threw the bomb has never been determined. What is certain, however, is that the eight men who were brought to trial; Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, and Michael Schwab, were not responsible. Six of them, in fact, were not even present when the explosion occurred, and the other two were demonstrably innocent of throwing the bomb. Moreover, no evidence was produced to connect the defendants with the bombthrower. Yet all eight were found guilty; seven were condemned to death and one (Neebe) to fifteen years in jail (the sentences of Schwab and Fielden were afterwards commuted to life imprisonment). The verdict was the product of perjured testimony, a packed jury, a biased judge, and public hysteria. On 10 November 1887, Lingg committed suicide in his cell with a cigar—shaped explosive smuggled to him by a fellow anarchist, Dyer D. Lum. The following day, 11 November, Parsons, Spies, Engel, and Fischer were hanged.

The five Chicago anarchists became martyrs. Their pictures were displayed at anarchist meetings; every year, 11 November was observed in their honor; and the last words of Parsons and Spies — ‘Let the voice of the people be heard!’ and ‘The time Will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!’ —— were often quoted in anarchist speeches and writings. Six years later, in 1893, the imprisoned men; Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab, were pardoned by Governor John P. Altgeld, who criticised the judge for conducting the trial ‘with malicious ferocity’ and found that the evidence had not shown that any of the eight anarchists were involved in the bombing.

The Haymarket affair the unfairness of the trial, the savagery of the sentences, the character and bearing of the defendants — fired the imagination of many young idealists and won more than a few to the anarchist cause. Among them was Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912), a talented writer and speaker, whom Emma Goldman called ‘the greatest woman Anarchist of America’. The fate of the Chicago anarchists haunted Voltairine de Cleyre’s life. Nearly every November, from 1895 on, she delivered a memorial oration to her fallen comrades. Despite some inevitable repetition, they were among the most powerful speeches of her career, written with painstaking care and delivered with an intensity of feeling that moved her audiences profoundly. Most of the speeches were delivered in Chicago, the scene of the Haymarket episode, but she also spoke in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Owing to illness, she does not seem to have spoken from 1902 through 1905. Of her dozen or so Haymarket addresses, I have been able to locate eight. Six of these appeared in various anarchist journals, while two apparently were never published (unfortunately, I have not been able to find her 1908 oration, which she considered her best to that date). Together they constitute a classic of anarchist literature, a remarkable group of essays on the theme which dominated her life.

New York City November 11, 1979

This article was pieced together from an article on anarkismo.net, edited and added to by libcom: Originally a pagan holiday, the roots of May Day are in the fight for the eight-hour working day in Chicago in 1886, and the subsequent execution of innocent anarchist workers. In 1887, four Chicago anarchists were executed; a fifth cheated [...]

A number and a flower

I’ve previously mentioned media critic Phil Sandifer, who since early 2011 has been blogging his way through every episode of Doctor Who (plus related phenomena) from 1963 to the present. (The reference to a “psychochronograph” in the recent Doctor Who episode “Hide” was a shout-out to Phil’s blog, which until recently was titled “TARDIS Eruditorum: A Psychochronography in Blue.”) He’s also been reworking the posts into chapters of a book series, the first three volumes of which (on the First, Second, and Third Doctors) have been published – though you might want to hold off on buying the first one, since a revised edition will be available soon.

For the last ten months Phil’s been valiantly slogging through the vast interregnum of novels, audioplays, and spinoffs (in other words, stuff I have no familiarity with) between the end of the classic series in 1989 and its revival in 2005. Now he has finally gotten to “Rose,” the first episode of the revived series, and has revamped the website for the occasion. Here’s the entry on “Rose.” Go read it! And here’s some background on “Rose.” Go read that too.

Around two hundred made their way through Bootle on one of two May Day marches and rallies taking place on Merseyside today. While the numbers were noticeably smaller than on the Stand Up in Bootle launch event at the end of February, the moving speeches from working class people outside the town's one stop shop will perhaps last longer in the memory. The crowd gathered outside Bootle town

As I write these words, it's still morning in London -- and already LabourStart's front page is full of coverage of May Day 2013, the international workers' holiday.

• In Istanbul, police have used tear gas to try to block trade unionists from gathering in the city's central Taksim square, scene of an infamous massacre in 1977.

• In Jakarta, a massive workers' rally with more than 135,000 participants has shut down the Indonesian capital.

• In Greece, a general strike by workers protesting against the highest unemployment levels in Europe has shut down much of the country's transport system.

Your local newspaper or television station may be reporting all these stories -- but I doubt it. That's why we created LabourStart 15 years ago -- precisely for moments like this when we need to know what is happening in the labour movement all over the world.

Please make sure to visit LabourStart today and spread the word to your friends, family, co-workers and fellow union members.

Thank you -- and happy May Day!

Eric Lee