Library

Brazil: popular revolt and its limits

Vitória 2011 bus fare protests

June 2018 marks five years since the wave of protests against the price of collective transportation, which shook the streets of hundreds of brazilian cities in 2013. At the heart of those riots was the Movimento Passe Livre (something like Free Pass Movement), an autonomous and horizontal social movement founded in 2005, which defended the gratuity of transport. Written in 2014 by two militants who later left the organization, this article reflects on the limits of that cycle of protests.

The Marxist ideology in Russia - Karl Korsch

Karl Korsch

In this text from 1938, Karl Korsch puts forward the notion that Marxism in Russia effectively served as the ideological cloak of capitalist development, but that this was in fact anticipated by theoretical concessions, made by Marx and Engels in the 1870s/1880s, to the ideas held by the Russian populists, the Narodniki.

E07: The West Virginia mine wars, 1902-1922

Striking West Virginia miner, 1921

Podcast episode on the West Virginia mine wars 1902-1922. We speak with Catherine Moore and others from the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, as well as some striking West Virginia teachers about the conflicts, and how they are remembered today.

Organization - Errico Malatesta

Malatesta article against anti-organizationalist anarchism

‘We knew where the power was’: Conversations with organizers of the North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union

A set of interviews, conducted by Jonathan Michels, with organisers involved in the North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union during the 1970s. This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Bay View, and readers who find it useful may wish to donate to keep the Bay View in print.

The Rebellion in Nicaragua

In the 1970s the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua was a cause celebre of the left and extreme left, in the same way the Zapatistas in Mexico were at the beginning of the 21st century, and the YPG in Rojava are now.

Abolish rent: for a communist tenants’ movement

California Hotel

This pamphlet poses a set of provocations to the contemporary tenants’ movement. The provocations are "Some Communist Theses for the Tenants' Movement" and "Abolish Rent, a note." As the pamphlet title declares, the provocation focuses on the proposition that “abolish rent” should be the slogan upon which militants promote a distinction in the movement between anarchists/communists and social democrats, toward the end of building a revolutionary tenants’ movement. (Not here, but to-be included in a future iteration, is an in-progress "Annotated Bibliography of Rent Abolitionist Tactics")