for workers' power from below
The next Bristol reading group session will be on Sunday 30th May at 6pm in Café Kino on Ninetree Hill, Stokes Croft, Bristol.
The session will discuss views of council communism and anarcho-syndicalism. Suggested background reading below. All welcome: email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for more info. Continue reading “council communism and anarcho-syndicalism: 30th may bristol reading group”
The next Bristol reading group session will be on Sunday 30th May at 6pm in Café Kino on Ninetree Hill, Stokes Croft, Bristol.
The session will discuss views of council communism and anarcho-syndicalism. Suggested background reading below. All welcome: email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for more info. Continue reading “council communism and anarcho-syndicalism: bristol reading group 30th may”
The latest issue of The Commune featured a supplement with an extended piece on workers’ councils by Sheila Cohen. Click image below to see PDF or read full text below.
The red mole may weave unexpected patterns and assume strange disguises; it is digging, digging fast, and moving in roughly the right direction…’
Daniel Singer, The Road to Gdansk. Continue reading “workers’ councils: the red mole of revolution”
by Moshé Machover: only the introduction is presented below, see the full document here.
The importance of this issue cannot be over-stated: it concerns the very essence of communism. If communism means anything at all, it means a radical eruption of democracy. Bursting its present narrow political confines, where it is allowed to hold truncated and partly illusory sway, democracy is to engulf all spheres of social life. This applies in particular to what is, under capitalism, the alienated sphere of economics: major choices that are now made behind the backs of society – imposed by private owners who monopolize wealth, or left to the chaotic play of blind market forces – will be decided consciously and collectively by the community concerned. The enormous extension of the sphere of collective decision-making will necessarily imply a corresponding expansion and deepening of the scope of public supervision, ensuring proper implementation of decisions. Continue reading “collective decision-making and supervision in a communist society”
We have printed more copies of our series of pamphlets, several of which (in particular the long-unavailable Venezuela pamphlet) were out of print. See below for a list of the seven pamphlets available. They cost £1 +50p postage per copy. To order online, work out the total of your purchases then ‘donate’ the money here, making sure to specify in the text box what you are ordering.
Alternatively, write to uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to place your order. We take payment by cheque (addressed to ‘The Commune’, at The Commune, 2nd Floor, 145-157 St. John Street, London EC1V 4PY) or by transfer to Co-op account S/C 089299, A/C 65317440. Continue reading “reprints of the commune’s pamphlets – buy online”
More copies of our pamphlet series, many of which had sold out, are now available. The text of each of the seven pamphlets is online (see the list of subjects below), but you can also order paper copies – £1 +50p postage per copy.
Write to uncaptiveminds@gmail.com to place your order. We take payment by cheque (addressed to ‘The Commune’, at The Commune, 2nd Floor, 145-157 St. John Street, London EC1V 4PY) or by transfer to Co-op account S/C 089299, A/C 65317440. Continue reading “the commune’s pamphlets: reprints now available”
by Allan Armstrong
Introduction
How many people today, even on what remains of the Left, publicly and confidently declare their support for ‘Communism’? Take just three British organisations, which claim to be key parts of the revolutionary Left – the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Nowhere in their What We Stand For columns is there any mention of communism. If these comrades are communists they are ‘closet communists’.
Looking tentatively out from their closets, with doors slightly ajar, they might whisper to those within hearing distance, that ‘Communism’ is nothing to get het-up about really. ‘Communism’ can be safely relegated to a distant future. The real task is “to build socialism”. If they make any reference at all to communism, it is confined to in-house events or theoretical journals and has about as much purchase on their everyday politics as ‘Clause 4 Socialism’ had for the reformist Left who led the old British Labour Party. If Marx hadn’t called himself a communist for most of his life and hadn’t entitled his best-known work, The Communist Manifesto, most of the British revolutionary Left would probably prefer to jettison the term altogether. Continue reading “why we need a new human emancipatory communism”
