if you’re a fan of the eternal struggle between good and evil, tune in to the Scottish Cup semi-final today and watch Celtic battle the forces of darkness
cyclideon
“We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferule of a law, which regulates every event in life - our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship - that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of Law, elaborated by a representative government and administered by a handful of rulers…”
— Kropotkin, Law and Authority: An Anarchist Essay
Marius Jacob and the “night workers” (c~ 1900-1903), a band of anarchist burglars as depicted by artist Flavio Costantini.
The night workers were united under three principles:
- one does not kill, except to protect his life and his freedom from the police;
- one steals only from those considered to be social parasites - bosses, judges, soldiers, and the clergy - but never from the professions considered useful - architects, doctors, artists, etc.;
- finally, a percentage of the stolen money was to be invested into the anarchist cause
Tours, 28. marzo 1903
“During the night of March 27th-28th, Alexandre Pelissard and Bour went to Tours where they intended to plunder the cathedral. This was one of the boldest feats they had ever accomplished…” B. Thomas, Jacob, p. 215.
On 24 February 1909, Ethel Macdonald was born in the Scottish town of Motherwell. As a teenager, she moved to Glasgow, worked in retail, and became an active socialist. In 1931 she began a long collaboration with the famous anarchist Guy Aldred. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, she helped publish and circulate “Regeneration,” a newssheet that supported the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). And on 20th October 1936, she left Glasgow for Spain, planning to provide English language reports on the revolution in Catalonia and Aragon. She spoke no Spanish, and by the time she got to Paris she had no money and no travel documents. Undaunted, she hitchhiked through France, sneaked across the border, and arrived in revolutionary Barcelona. She sent regular reports, which were published in radical and mainstream Scottish papers, describing how factories and villages were collectivised and how religious buildings were turned into hospitals, libraries, and schools. Her writings also contain interesting social details that help us to picture life in revolutionary times: British volunteers tended to get drunk upon arriving in Spain “perhaps (…) because they are unaccustomed to wine”; men and women soldiers were indistinguishable in dress, except that “all the girls had beautifully permed hair and were strikingly made up.” From January 1937 she achieved fame as the English language voice of the CNT’s anarchist radio station. Her reports were listened to around the world and her Scottish accent proved especially popular in the United States. In May 1937, the Stalinist Communist Party began to purge the anti-fascist movement of revolutionaries who didn’t agree with the Communists’ authoritarian structure. In Barcelona, Ethel helped anarchists defend the barricades against Communist soldiers, and later she smuggled food and letters to imprisoned comrades. She helped foreign anarchists to escape Spain and the British press dubbed her the “Scots Scarlet Pimpernel.” Soon she too was imprisoned by the Communists, and upon her release she went into hiding, moving from house to house as she sheltered among Barcelona’s remaining anarchists. On 24th September 1937, The Evening Times ran the headline, “Miss Ethel Macdonald reaches Paris.” She returned to Glasgow and embarked on a speaking tour across the UK. Following the outbreak of WW2, she received call up papers for the Women’s National Service. She returned them with the words “Get Lost.” When she received further papers, she wrote back, “Come and get me.” The authorities decided against chasing the famous Scots’ Scarlet Pimpernel. She remained active in the radical movement, until she died of multiple sclerosis on 1st December 1960. This our archive of content on the Spanish Civil War: http://ift.tt/2ChqLLW http://ift.tt/2sPo2Fw
At least one lesson has been learned: what was missing was not a small party which could direct a large mass; what was missing was the consciousness and confidence on the part of the entire working population that they could themselves direct their social activity. If the workers had possessed this consciousness on the day they occupied their factories, they would have proceeded to expropriate their exploiters; in the absence of this consciousness, no party could have ordered the workers to take the factories into their own hands. What was missing was class consciousness in the mass of the working population, not the party discipline of a small group. And class consciousness cannot be created by a closed, secret group but only by a vast, open movement which develops forms of activity which aim openly to subvert the existing social order by eliminating the servant-mentality from the entire working population.
Fredy Perlman, Worker-student action committees, France May ‘68 (via class-struggle-anarchism)
Giveaway Contest: We recently reached 50,000 followers, and as a way of thanking you, we’re giving away FIFTY (50!) vintage paperback classics by Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Jane Austen, and so many others! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will choose a random winner on January 20, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!
YASSS! (I never win anything)
Communism now - if it means anything - means this: to seek the end of the boredom of struggle. The end of the boredom of poverty, the end of the need to battle property to have food, shelter and the ability to exist. It means the end of the boredom of work, the end of the struggle against work, the end of the day in the field or the factory or the dullness of the call centre. The end of the boredom of struggle against those who would prevent what we chose to be, what we chose to do and who we chose to love. While we might see the best of what we are in the struggle now, we can only imagine the best of what we might become without this weight upon us. Without this weight of violence, without the boredom of struggle.
Form Of Life Collective, What Is To Be Won (via by-strategy)
A 3-hour documentary on anarchist history with lots historical footage and interviews I've never seen before? Yep... Saving this one for a rainy day.
In the fewest words, anarchism teaches that we can live in a society where there is no compulsion of any kind. A life without compulsion naturally means liberty; it means freedom from being forced or coerced, a chance to lead the life that suits you best.
Alexander Berkman, 1928 (via class-struggle-anarchism)
infernalseason-deactivated20180
The Red Warriors, Paris, late 1980s.
“The Red Warriors used violent force to remove Neo Nazi gangs from France and provide safe spaces for immigrants during the rise of white nationalism and an outbreak of violent crime against people of colour. They formed a squat called “L.U.S.I.N.E” and were considered the most effect gang to counter nazi violence, working to instill fear in their opposition. “
Lewisham is my endz...would’ve loved to have witnessed this back in the day. South-east Londoners take no shit.
We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man under Socialism
(via pisshets)
And in our own time, nobody should underestimate the power of the misbegotten dichotomy between thought and action, theory and practice, real and imaginary… these ideas are forces of organisation. The world of falsehood is a real world, people are killing one another there, and we’d better not forget it.
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (via carnivalconsciousness)
Consider some facts about how American employers control their workers. Amazon prohibits employees from exchanging casual remarks while on duty, calling this “time theft.” Apple inspects the personal belongings of its retail workers, some of whom lose up to a half-hour of unpaid time every day as they wait in line to be searched. Tyson prevents its poultry workers from using the bathroom. Some have been forced to urinate on themselves while their supervisors mock them.
About half of US employees have been subject to suspicionless drug screening by their employers. Millions are pressured by their employers to support particular political causes or candidates. Soon employers will be empowered to withhold contraception coveragefrom their employees’ health insurance. They already have the right to penalize workers for failure to exercise and diet, by charging them higher health insurance premiums.
How should we understand these sweeping powers that employers have to regulate their employees’ lives, both on and off duty? Most people don’t use the term in this context, but wherever some have the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions, in some domain of life, that authority is a government.
We usually assume that “government” refers to state authorities. Yet the state is only one kind of government. Every organization needs some way to govern itself — to designate who has authority to make decisions concerning its affairs, what their powers are, and what consequences they may mete out to those beneath them in the organizational chart who fail to do their part in carrying out the organization’s decisions.
Managers in private firms can impose, for almost any reason, sanctions including job loss, demotion, pay cuts, worse hours, worse conditions, and harassment. The top managers of firms are therefore the heads of little governments, who rule their workers while they are at work — and often even when they are off duty.
By fighting the police, taking over the streets, and squatting the universities, anarchists can inspire people, ignite passions, capture the national attention and raise the fear, which everyone immediately smells and is intoxicated by, that things can change. By spreading anarchist ideas, turning the universities into free schools, setting up occupation committees, organizing strikes, and preventing the domination of the student assemblies by the political parties, other anarchists can provide a bridge for more people to be involved, make overtures for solidarity to other sectors of society, and strengthen the movement that has provided a basis for the possibility of change. If these two types of anarchists work together, the insurrectionary ones are less likely to be disowned as outsiders and isolated, thrown to the police, because they have allies in the very middle of the movement. And when the state approaches the organized anarchists in the movement in an attempt to negotiate, they are less likely to give in because they have friends outside the organization holding them accountable and reminding them that power is in the streets.
Peter Gelderloos, Insurrection vs. Organization: Reflections from Greece on a Pointless Schism (via dialectical-devitoism)
Source: theanarchistlibrary.org