anarchists

By Seth Harp
Rolling Stone

On the front lines of Syria with the young American radicals fighting ISIS

On the morning of his first battle, Brace Belden was underdressed for the cold and shaky from a bout of traveler's diarrhea. His Kurdish militia unit was camped out on the front line with ISIS, 30 miles from Raqqa, in Syria. Fighters stood around campfires of gas-soaked trash, boiling water for tea, their only comfort besides tobacco. "I've never been so dirty in my life," Belden recalls. When the time came to roll out, he loaded a clip into his Kalashnikov and climbed into a makeshift battlewagon, a patchwork of tank and truck parts armored with scrap metal and poured concrete. Belden took a selfie inside its rusty cabin and posted it online with the caption "Wow this freakin taxi stinks."

Note: This piece is a reworked extract from my book Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010, http://www.akpress.org/anarchism-and-its-aspirations.html) for the Lexicon pamphlet series put together by the Institute for Anarchist Studies. You can download a PDF version and/or listen to an audio version of this pamphlet, along with the other four titles in this series, at of this pamphlet http://anarchiststudies.org/lexicon-pamphlet-series/.

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by Cindy Milstein

From Its Going Down

By Way of Introduction

To get a picture of the anarchist movement in Chile and, further, to understand the phenomenon of its impetus, resurgence and persistence over time as an irreducible practice, threatening capitalist normality and unchecked of any negotiations with bourgeois legalism, one must understand the ongoing tension between the mechanisms of repression applied by the STATE and the liberating and uncompromising response by the ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN network throughout its history.

By Milan Djurasovic
www.countercurrents.org
October 17th, 2016

George Woodcock, a prominent Canadian writer and anarchist thinker, writes that anarchism’s “ultimate aim is always social change; its present attitude is always one of social condemnation, even though it may proceed from an individualist view of man’s nature; its method is always that of social revolution, violent or otherwise.”[1]

by Chad Nelson
October 8, 2016
Center for a Stateless Society

At some point in the late fifties or early sixties, Pacifica Radio’s Charlie Hayden interviewed the inimitable Robert Anton Wilson on all things anarchism. Wilson waxes poetic on anarchism’s foundations and answers some challenging questions from a presumable skeptic in Hayden. While the exact date of the interview is unknown, the early to mid-sixties appear to have been Wilson’s most overtly anarchist period. Wilson references Ralph Borsodi’s “School of Living” in the interview without mentioning anything about his position as editor of SoL’s anarchist publication, “Way Out.” This is a good indication that the interview likely occurred prior to the beginning of Wilson’s tenure there in 1962. I maintain that Wilson seemed to be a lifelong anarchist in spirit, despite explicitly shedding that label in favor of the more ambiguous “libertarian” label in his later years.

By Julie Phillips
The New Yorker

Politics has been obsessing a lot of people lately, and Ursula K. Le Guin is far from immune to bouts of political anger. In an e-mail to me last winter, she wrote that she felt “eaten up” with frustration at the ongoing occupation of an eastern Oregon wildlife refuge by an armed band of antigovernment agitators led by the brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy. She was distressed by the damage they had done to scientific programs and to historical artifacts belonging to the local Paiute tribe, and critical of the F.B.I. for being so slow to remove these “hairy gunslinging fake cowboys” from public property. She had been mildly cheered up, she added, by following a Twitter feed with the hashtag #BundyEroticFanFic.

by Anarcho
Anarchist Writers
September 29, 2016

Why bother with the Russian Revolution? The Soviet Union, rightly, has been classed as a failed, horrific, experiment since its collapse in 1991 so what is the benefit to have yet another book on it? There are three main reasons why this excellent book is worth your time.

First, a great many socialists still believe in what one of its authors, Alexander Berkman, labelled The Bolshevik Myth and are busy trying to reproduce what the Bolsheviks did. They need facts, not fairy tales. Second, revolutions have a habit of breaking out when least expected and learning the lessons from previous ones makes sense. Third, these are the works of two of the world’s leading revolutionary anarchists seeking to do both of these important tasks when it was deeply unfashionable to do so – in the 1920s and 1930s.