Discussions about Identity Politics (IdPol) absorbs a huge amount of energy across the political spectrum.  Discussion on the left however is often complicated and made overly hostile because they take place along the single axis of oppression which means proponents of IdPol get lumped in with Hilary Clinton while opponents get lumped in with Donald Trump.  This understandably encourages bad faith discussions that throw a lot of heat and very little light. Here we are going to argue that a much more useful exchange can happen when we instead create a plot where one axis is oppression and the second is exploitation as that puts both Trump & Clinton a good distance away from socialists. [Audio of this article]

 The vote to remove the ban on abortion from the Irish constitution in May 2018 was overwhelmingly carried, with almost 2 out of every 3 voters voting Yes remove the ban. The margin of victory was such that some post-referendum polemics made the mistake of arguing that victory was always inevitable, that the campaign didn’t matter. Such arguments tended to be made by opinion writers who never liked the Repeal campaign and in some cases published pieces during the campaign arguing that unless whatever aspect they disliked was dropped the referendum would be lost.

In 1994 Class War organised an international anarchist gathering in London under the heading of ’10 days the shook the world’. It provided a location that brought together a number of anarchist who had been working on the promotion of the anarchist idea online and set off a string of collaborations that would last in some cases to the present day.

System of Economic Contradictions

or, the Philosophy of Misery

Volume 2

(Translated by Iain McKay)

Chapter XIV: Summary and Conclusion

It has been said of Newton, to express the immensity of his discoveries, that he has revealed the abyss of human ignorance.

Bank of the People

31^st January 1849

Translator: Clarence L. Swartz (“Declaration” and “Formation of the Company”) and Ian Harvey (“Report of the Luxembourg Delegate and Workers’ Corporation Commission”)

Organisation of Credit and Circulation and the Solution of the Social Problem

31^st March 1848

Translators: Clarence L. Swartz and Jesse Cohn

PROGRAMME

It has been proved that Socialist doctrines are powerless to relieve the People in the present crisis.[1] Utopia needs for its realisation capital accumulated, credit opened, circulation established and a prosperous state. It has need of everything we now lack; and these it is powerless to create.

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.

The State and Revolution: Theory and Practice

This is almost my chapter in the anthology Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrrevolution (Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2017). Some revisions were made during the editing process which are not included here. In addition, references to the 1913 French edition of Kropotkin’s Modern Science and Anarchy have been replaced with those from the 2018 English-language translation. However, the bulk of the text is the same, as is the message and its call to learn from history rather than repeat it. I would, of course, urge you to buy the book.

It is a standard cliché of Marxist attacks on anarchism to contrast “individualistic” anarchism with “collectivist” syndicalism. The former are backward looking, reactionary and beyond the pale while the latter are almost Marxist, and so worthy of faint praise. Another, also wrong, cliché has wider acceptance, namely that syndicalism arose in France during the 1890s in response to the failure of “propaganda of the deed.”

At the start of the referendum campaign in March, I took this photograph showing the poster image of Savita, who died because of the 8th amendment, and in the background a huge billboard with a CGI / cartoon of what is meant to be an 11 week old foetus.  Both have the common slogan ‘one of us’ - the photograph invites us to consider if the life of this 31-year-old woman of colour, who was denied a life-saving abortion, really has the same value as an anonymous and unknown 11-week-old foetus.

This is the question we will be voting on this Friday, indeed beyond that we are voting on whether a doctor who gives a life-saving abortion in a Savita-like case should have the threat of a 14-year jail sentence hanging over them - as the 2013 law lays down - whether any of the hundreds of pregnant people taking abortion pills at home in Ireland should be doing so under the risk of that 14-year sentence.  That is the law as it stands - to change it, the 8th must be repealed.