Archive for January, 2010

Hardt & Negri on anarchists (2000)

Published January 23, 2010 Anarchism , Marxism , Theory Leave a Comment

“You are just a bunch of anarchists, the new Plato on the block will finally yell at us. That is not true. We would be anarchists if we were not to speak (as did Thrasymacus and Callicles, Plato’s immortal interlocutors) from the standpoint of a materiality constituted in the networks of of productive cooperation, in other words, from the perspective of a humanity that is constructed productively, that is constituted through the “common name” of freedom. No, we are not anarchists but communists who have seen how much repression and destruction of humanity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments. We have seen how all this is being re-created in imperial government, just when the circuits of productive cooperation have made labor power as a whole capable of constituting itself in government.”

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Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p 350. [Italics in the original.]

‘Without Borders’ SF anarchist gathering, flyer (1989)

Published January 20, 2010 Anarchism Leave a Comment

‘Without Borders’ was the last of  the 1980s anarchist conferences / gatherings / festivals that were held in the US and Canada. These included Chicago (1986), Minneapolis (1987) and Toronto (1988). Thousands of people attended the San Francisco event. Among other things, the Love & Rage project emerged from the gatherings. This specific image is scanned from the zine A New Iron Column. (Click on image to enlarge.)

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Skirda on “Jewish capital” and the Dreyfus Affair

Published January 16, 2010 Anarchism , Antisemitism , Jewish Culture & Religion Leave a Comment

In fact, the period was profoundly marked by that [Dreyfus] Affair: it gave rise to a confused turmoil in which a revolutionary cat would have had great difficulty identifying her kittens! The root cause of it all was the unjust conviction of a captain, (a millionaire and son of a millionaire in the francs of the day) on account of his Jewish faith. Many anarchists let themselves be dragged into this questionable episode; Sébastien Faure even set up a daily newspaper with the backing of Jewish capital, and good comrades wrote for it. It is questionable whether libertarians seized upon the issue the better to attack and discredit the army, the very army whose commanders had waded deep in the blood of the Communards. This, it was a sort of revenge from beyond the grave, albeit in a very roundabout fashion. But let us move on.

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from Alexandre Skirda, Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968, translated Paul Sharkey. (Edinburgh & Oakland: AK Press, 2002), p 70 footnote 5.

Juan García Oliver: “revolutionary syndicalism serves the proletariat, whereas anarchism is one brand of humanism”

Published January 15, 2010 Anarchism , Theory 1 Comment

Q. Given how your life developed, that was a significant discovery.

A. Yes, especially as it was during that [[waiters’]] strike that with other comrades from the trade, young men, we had set up an anarchist group that affiliated itself to the Barcelona Local Federation of Anarchist Groups. That federation bore the name “Bandera Negra” [Black Flag], borrowed from the title of the newspaper it published. In Barcelona there was another federation of groups as well, the “Bandera Roja” [Red Flag]. “Bandera Negra” was, let us say, a classic receptacle for anarchist ideas and was against revolutionary syndicalism. “Bandera Roja” claimed to be close to revolutionary syndicalism but it was, all in all, syndicalism pure and simple, with all that that implies… I imagine we’ll be returning to this theme as our interview proceeds.

Continue reading ‘Juan García Oliver: “revolutionary syndicalism serves the proletariat, whereas anarchism is one brand of humanism”’

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