As discussed previously in ASR (in “160 Years of Libertarian,” ASR 71-2), the good word libertarian was knowingly stolen from the left by American right-wing (classical) liberals in the 1950s. This appropriation of libertarian to describe an ideology which happily supports “voluntary” slavery and dictatorship by property owners, never mind wage-labour, has resulted in much confusion – as well as ASR (Anarcho-Syndicalist Review changing its name from Libertarian Labor Review in the 1990s.

In a pattern all to common across rural Ireland hundreds of Yes posters were torn down in an organised fashion by what had to be No activists across Country Cork last night.  This anti-democratic rage typifies the No campaign which has has so much wealth that it is printing 10 No posters to every Yes.  All across Ireland the few Yes posters there are to distribute have been torn down, in one case we have heard of in the west they have even been discovered in the houses of No campaigners.  This is ahead of the May 25th referendum to remove the article of the Irish constitution that equates the life of a women with that of a foetus.

On the 18th of February, 13 families who were being housed in an emergency accommodation facility on 54-55 Mountjoy street were handed an eviction notice, ending their tenancy in just 8 days time.

The rise of fascism in Italy is a subject of interest to anarchists as Mussolini's rise cannot be detached from the biennio rosso, the two red years of 1919 and 1920. Italy was on the verge of social revolution, reaching a peak with the factory occupations of 1920.

The mid 1990's status of the European far-right as a primarily racist rather than fascist movement does effect the way we fight it. It is the official racism of the governments and opposition parties that has made the far right acceptable. Before World War Two fascism did not arise to head off an imminent revolution in either Germany or Italy. It arose because the bosses needed to squeeze the working class a lot harder than the democratic capitalist state was capable of. Wage cuts were so savage under fascism that wages in Germany, for instance, did not reach the 1931 level until 1956.

 In the period of the 1930's every western government saw fascism as a useful bulwark against 'communism'. From the early 1920's Italian anarchists had physically fought the fascists and even after World War II anarchists were being jailed for fighting the fascist Italian state in that period. Individual acts were just the tip of anarchist organisation against fascism.

One clear lesson that emerges from the pre-war period is that the fight against fascism cannot be won by the work of 'heroic militants' once fascism has received the backing of capitalism and the state. In Italy, Germany or Spain nothing short of a revolution would have defeated fascism. As in every other case, a successful revolution would have required that the working class as a whole mobilised against the state and the fascist gangs and collectively crushed them.