In the campaign for a chance to repeal the hated 8th amendment - the anti-choice clause that was in the Irish constitution - March 8th 2017 was a key date. On that morning thousands of people took a day off work or college to hold protests in the city centre demanding a referendum that then converged on O'Connell street bridge, blocking it for a couple of hours around lunchtime.  That evening there was an International Womens Day march, also demanding a referendum.  

We included an appendix on “The Symbols of Anarchy” in An Anarchist FAQ which covered the two main flags of Anarchy, the black and the red-and-black. Later, we blogged about “The Red Flag of Anarchy” and how the likes of Proudhon and Bakunin associated themselves with this iconic embalm of labour and socialism. Here, we add new material.

Since last blogging, I've been concentrating on my two talks. Both were well attended (beyond official capacity) and seemed to go down well, although obviously the audience decides that. I tried to get too much in the first talk, but then I had to cover a lot of ground (maybe in ten libertarians would have been better?). Still, it was nice to go through such important activists and thinkers – particularly women libertarians, as these are often overlooked (which was why the Five Leaves people wanted it organised).

 The WSM are shocked and deeply saddened to learn of the death of Alan MacSimoin, one of our founder members, a friend, and a key central figure in building the anarchist movement in Ireland for over four decades. Alan had not been a member of WSM for some years but remained politically active right to the end. His last Facebook post on November 29th was supporting the locked out bricklayers at Mary’s Mansions. Alan will be sorely missed by all in the WSM and we offer our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends.

 On the apolitical labelling of the movement - Many of us have been following the Yellow Vest clashes on the streets of France with great interest and trying to understand this movement that appeared to come from nowhere. It is another story of the pressures of late stage capitalism collapsing the center of politics, a center no longer able to fool more of the people most of the time. A movement made possible by social media but which also reflects the often chaotic ‘apolitics’ of such movements. And worrying in the context of the millions being poured into far right propaganda a movement in which the far-right have made some progress in infiltrating, even if our comrades in France are physically driving them out of the protests.

Before giving the details of my forthcoming talks I need to mention a few things.

This blog notes three Proudhon texts going on-line, two of which are in Property is Theft! and another newly translated although a previous partial translation appeared there. These preface a discussion of leading Marxist David Harvey’s account of Proudhon’s ideas in his recent book Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason (London: Profile Books, 2017). They are related, in-so-far as Harvey claims to be critiquing Proudhon’s System of Economic Contradictions and the texts are a new, complete translation of its Conclusion and extracts from Proudhon’s attempt to implement his ideas during the 1848 Revolution, Organisation of Credit and The Bank of the People.

First off, as part of the Second Nottingham Radical Bookfair, I will be marking the publication by AK Press of the last book Peter Kropotkin published in his lifetime, Modern Science and Anarchy (1913):

Well, there has been no blogging for a bit – been far too busy, both at work and on various projects. My A Libertarian Reader is coming together, although currently I’m trudging through the corrections to my introduction to PM Press' new edition of Voline's The Unknown Revolution. They change-tracked everything – so thousands upon thousands of minor changes to accept/reject. Not fun. I have managed to post two articles.

Sorry for the lack of blogging and articles, but have been somewhat busy. First, I had to prepare a talk on the 1848 Revolution (which I now need to write up).