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]

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.

This is a write-up of my notes for the book launch of Kropotkin’s Modern Science and Anarchy in Nottingham, 17^th of November 2018. This, in turn, was a slightly revised version of a talk I did in Edinburgh early that year. As with all my subsequent write-ups, this is more what I aimed to say rather than what was said (this, for example, has far fewer jokes than uttered on the day). Still, it covers the main points said on the day.

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.

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.”

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was for four decades a leading anarchist thinker and writer. His many articles and books – Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Toward an Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom and a host of others – are libertarian classics and influential in the wider green movement.

Anarchism is generally not associated with economics. There is no “Anarchist” school of economics as there are “Marxist,” “Keynesian” and so on ones. This does not mean there are no anarchist texts on economics.