Infoshop Library

Alfredo M. BONANNO, Anarchism and the national liberation struggle, Londres, Elephant editions, 1990 (2ème édition anglaise – traduction de Jean Weir -, 5ème réimpression). 1ère édition en italien, Catania, Underground s.r.l.

The anarchist project concerning the national liberation struggle is very clear : it must not go towards constituting an « intermediate stage » towards the social revolution through the formation of new national States. Anarchists refuse to participate in national liberation fronts, they participate in class fronts which may or may not be involved in national liberation struggles. The struggle must spread to establish economic, political and social structures in the liberated territories, based on federalist and libertarian forms of organisation.

Introduction

Anarchists have tended to shy away from the problem of the national liberation struggle or rejected it entirely because of their internationalist principles.

by Bob Black

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

Bob Black

There is no need at present to produce new definitions of anarchism - it would be hard to improve on those long since devised by various eminent dead foreigners. Nor need we linger over the familiar hyphenated anarchisms, communist- and individualist- and so forth; the textbooks cover all that. More to the point is why we are no closer to anarchy today than were Godwin and Proudhon and Kropotkin and Goldman in their times. There are lots of reasons, but the ones that most need to be thought about are the ones that the anarchists engender themselves, since it is these obstacles - if any - it should be possible to remove. Possible, but not probable.

Talk given by Andrew Blackmore on 23 November, 1994 to Workers Solidarity Movement meeting, Dublin, Ireland.

Malatesta was one of the famous anarchists of the 19th century. He lived 79 years. Not as much is known of him as for example Bakunin or Kropotkin for a few reasons. He never kept a diary, he was Italian, and he was very active and continually hopping from one country to another, which meant he never kept a store of his own writings. For these reasons he has not been an attractive person to study and write about, because the work would be too hard.

BAD Broadside #7

Since late April, much has been written in the left and anarchist press about the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King and the beatings, killings, and stealing that followed shortly afterwards in Los Angeles. As could be expected most of the leftist press either endorsed or apologized for the violence committed by the residents of LA, while justly condemning that of the LA Police Department. What is more distressing, but no less surprising, is the fact that some of the anarchist press, as well, has either supported or been unwilling to criticize the beatings and killings that took place in LA on April 29 and the following days.

The debate about drug use in this country is usually framed in terms of continued criminalization vs legalization. the positions in this debate mean continued harassment, including arrests, imprisonment, theft of property, and possibly in the near future, execution of drug dealers and users, vs legal regulation of drug use and sales, similar to that of alcohol and cigarettes, including heavy taxation, and restraints on where, when and to whom drugs can be sold. Both of these positions are based on the same assumption, government has the right to tell individuals what they can and cannot do. While legalization would surely be preferable to continued criminalization, there is a third alternative: decriminalization and deregulation. Decriminalization and deregulation of drugs would mean no laws against drugs, no government regulation of drugs sales and use, no arrests, no prisons, no taxes.

Dave Neal

From Practical Anarchy #10 (Winter 1997/1998)

Part One: Mass Media Versus Massive Media

THE HEADLESS BEAST

There's been a move among think tanks (particularly RAND) and policymakers to come up with ways of dealing with the "problem" of the Internet. It seems they are concerned about decentralized, popular, democratized media, and want to get busy finding ways of bringing the Internet under control, like the other mass media: newspapers, radio, film, and television. Characteristically, they use militaristic euphemisms to define the coming "netwar" of the future, which amounts to the destruction of popular democracy on the Internet in favor of centralized, sanitized control.

An article by Wayne Price for Black History Month 2010 on the relevance of Malcolm X's life and philosophy to anarchism.

“There will Ultimately be a Clash between the Oppressed and Those Who do the Oppressing”

In the U.S., February is Black History Month. This is a good time to review the life of Malcolm X, one of the great leaders of the Black Liberation movement of the 60s. Anarchism, as an overall theory, is well-known to be rather loose and eclectic. Therefore anarchists have taken a great deal from other schools of thought, such as Marxism, feminism, Queer theory, ecology, radical psychoanalysis, post-modernism, etc. In my opinion, revolutionary anarchists also have much to learn from the life and thinking of Malcolm X.

One issue that remains unresolved within the anarchist movement revolves around the nature of anarchists themselves. If you've perused these pages, you by now know about social anarchism versus lifestyle anarchism as the most public schism among anarchists, with the latter deriding class struggle as fruitless, pointless, and irrelevant, and the former declaring that the latter aren't anarchists at all, but are rather bourgeois poseurs.

To the casual browser, it seems a silly, pointless debate. And in many respects, you're right! The social versus lifestylism debate revolves around the idea of ''what it means to be an anarchist''.

BAD Broadside #6

A generally accepted anarchist tenet is that the State can only be effectively dismantled by a voluntary, cooperative and spontaneous insurrection by the people. Authoritarian revolutions gotten up by manipulative vanguardists are rejected as inconsistent with the anarchist belief that the means must be consistent with the ends. History has plenty of examples to show that seizure of power through elitist revolt, rather than furthering the goals of the revolution, actually becomes a process for the strengthening of the State in a new and more vicious form. From an evanescent moment of exultant freedom one inevitably wakes up to the hangover of a Napoleon or a Lenin or a Mao.