Archive for the 'Anarchism' Category

Could a CNT-UGT Alliance Have Won the Spanish Civil War?

Published November 14, 2022 Anarchism Leave a Comment

Based on his experiences as a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War from late summer 1936 to early 1937, Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit gives a sympathetic but critical view of the various Left and liberal factions — with a focus on anarchists in the CNT-FAI, the non-Stalinist but Marxist POUM, the Stalinist CP, and the socialists in the UGT. In his conclusion, he gives an interesting assessment about how the out-gunned Spanish republic could have defeated Franco’s alliance of fascists and others on the Far Right (although he doubts even this would be workable due to what he saw as the real desires of the Spanish people).

“To-day the communists in Spain combine both the revolutionary centralization of Robespierre and the Thermidorian policy of his successors. They make a dictatorship, but it is a dictatorship not in favour of the revolutionary classes. Such a policy could not last for a fortnight if republican Spain had to live on the enthusiastic support of the people; it can last, and will doubtless continue to last, because the Spanish people have failed to make their own revolution efficient. The Trotskyists, who complain so bitterly about this result, must blame themselves for it. In fact, they are even more to blame than any other group. They have, in their mechanical repetition of formulae from books about Marxism and the Russian revolution, been unable to create a mass movement at all. Anarchists and socialists at least succeeded in doing that. But probably in this case, as in so many others, it is superficial to blame individual groups and leaders at all.

Had the Trotskyists in Spain not been dogmatic Marxists of foreign inspiration, they would have been nearer to Spanish realities. But then they would have been a genuinely Spanish movement, which is to say they would have been exactly like those socialists and anarchists who have so conspicuously not succeeded. From whatever aspect the problems of the Spanish revolution are treated, from whatever starting-point discussed, the final result is always that things might have been otherwise provided that—Spain were not Spain. Had the Spaniards been able to create a revolutionary movement strong enough to beat a counter-revolution armed with European arms, then Russian help would have been superfluous, then things would have taken another turn, then socialists and anarchists would have gradually merged into one single revolutionary party, backed by the spontaneous enthusiasm of both workers and peasants; they would have won the war, and created a new order of things, less dictatorial, more humane and more progressive than the present Russian regime.”

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Source: Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit: An Eye-Witness Account of the Political and Social Conflicts of the Spanish Civil War, “Conclusions” chapter; originally published 1937.

Do Fanzines Fund the Anarchist Movement?

Published June 6, 2021 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk Leave a Comment

While an otherwise pretty good essay considering that one of its authors was the chief of the Eugene, Oregon police department, there is one line that has always stuck out to me:

“Many of the higher level [anarchist] organizers and activists have taken to traveling by bus or even airplane and many of them have traveled internationally, especially to Europe. Little is know of the financing structure for that kind of work. Funding sources such as voluntary contributions, book sales, “distros” (selling of shirts, symbols, etc.), and ‘zine sales appear to be the back-bone of financing.”

Keep selling those zines, kids – the higher level organizers are counting on you!

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from Randy Borum and Chuck Tilby, “Anarchist Direct Actions: A Challenge for Law Enforcement,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 28:210-233 (2005)

Alexander Berkman: “we kissed the image of the social revolution”

Published November 4, 2019 Anarchism Leave a Comment

[from a letter to Emma Goldman]

“To grasp your hand, to look down for a mute, immortal instant into your soul, and then die at your hands, Beloved, with the warm breath of your caress wafting into peaceful eternity – oh, it were bliss supreme, the realization of our day dreams, when, in transports of ecstasy, we kissed the image of the Social Revolution.”

……

“Every penny spent for ourselves was so much taken from the Cause. True, the revolutionist must live. But luxury is a crime; worse, a weakness. One could exist on five cents a day. Twenty cents for a single meal! It was robbery.”

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Alexander Berman, Prison Memoirs (NY: New York Review of Books, 1999), 148-49, 72.

Edward Bellamy Disses Anarchists in “Looking Backward”

Published January 17, 2017 Anarchism Leave a Comment

Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward 2000–1887 is often praised as the best-selling agit-prop socialist novel of the late 19th century. In fact, it’s a wooden didactic piece which praises a purely technocractic future, disses the radical left, and is complete with the main character having a super-creepy marriage. In this passage, Bellamy clearly tries to promote the idea that the radical left of his day was a “false flag” operation:

“By the way,” said I [main character Julian West], as the doctor read aloud to us some of these items, “what part did the followers of the red flag take in the establishment of the new order of things? They were making considerable noise the last thing that I knew.”

“They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of course,” replied Dr. Leete. “They did that very effectually while they lasted, for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best considered projects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of those fellows was one of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform.”

“Subsidizing them!” I exclaimed in astonishment.

“Certainly,” replied Dr. Leete. “No historical authority nowadays doubts that they were paid by the great monopolies to wave the red flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order, by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms. What astonishes me most is that you should have fallen into the trap so unsuspectingly.”

“What are your grounds for believing that the red flag party was subsidized?” I inquired.

“Why simply because they must have seen that their course made a thousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend. Not to suppose that they were hired for the work is to credit them with an inconceivable folly.* In the United States, of all countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation, as the national party eventually did.”

* I fully admit the difficulty of accounting for the course of the anarchists on any other theory than that they were subsidized by the capitalists, but at the same time, there is no doubt that the theory is wholly erroneous. It certainly was not held at the time by any one, though it may seem so obvious in the retrospect.

###

source: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bellamy-ed/works/backward/ch24.htm

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887, originally published 1888.

Prague’s massive Global Street Party action (1998)

Published October 25, 2015 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk Leave a Comment
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czech-cover.pix“It was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration to draw attention to the effects of globalization on the environment. Up to 3,000 people attended the so-called Global Street Party on náměstí Miru on 16 May [1998], which featured music and dancing. The event was organised by Earth First!, Proti proudu/Rainbow Keepers, and the Czechoslovak Anarchist Federation, was authorized by police, and took place peacefully. But in the later afternoon, an estimated 2,000 participants, mostly youths, started an unauthorized march across Prague. Eventually the march wound its way down to Prague’s Old Town. At that point, a smaller group headed off for Wenceslas Square, where some participants started breaking the storefront windows of McDonald’s and KFC outlets in the square and on Vodičkova Street. After violent clashes, the police managed to disperse the crowd. Initially, more than 60 people were detained and 25 of them were charged with breaking the peace and other offenses. A handful of people filed official complaints about police brutality during the arrests. The entire incident, the first of its kind in the Czech Republic, has sparked a debate in the Czech media about the country’s youth and the police’s ability to handle such demonstrations. The following is a selection of articles that appeared in the Czech press after the incident.”

czech street party.pix= = =

from The New Presence: The Prague Journal of Central European Affairs, June 1998, pages 18-19.

RADICAL ARCHIVES note: The 1998 Global Street Parties were Reclaim the Streets actions held around the world. They were one of a number of events that were direct precursors to the Seattle demonstrations against the WTO in November-December 1999. The Prague one is of note for both its size, location in Eastern Europe, and the fact that it was explicitly sponsored by a self-identified Anarchist federation along with semi-anarchist groups.

Notes From Some Portland Anarchists (1999)

Published October 12, 2015 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk , Theory Leave a Comment

pdx @.1.imagepdx@.2.imageNotes From Some Portland Anarchists
#1 April 1999

Introduction

This broadsheet is the result of a group effort arising from the Portland General Anarchist meetings. While this has come out of those meetings, it does not represent it. At the present our idea is simply to distribute this for use as a resource sheet. In the future we are interested in seeing it grow, to be used as a forum for a Portland anarchist network – a place for groups and individuals to share ideas, as well as information on gatherings and actions. A question that we had to answer at the outset of the project was whether we should try and draw an ideological line between anarchism and the Left in Portland as criteria for selecting items to print – does it even matter? We say it doesn’t. So while all of these groups are not specifically anarchist, they do express anarchist ideals and are part of the larger anarchist milieu in Portland. One more thing that should be noted is that we wrote all of the descriptions that appear below-please contact us if you would like to see things added, subtracted or generally changed in any way.

Centers

Sisters of the Road Cafe was founded on three principles: to be a safe public space, to offer nourishing meals that are affordable, and to offer work experience. “The entire community is welcome to eat in this little restaurant and break the myths that say we are so different from one another” – “come on down order, a cup of coffee, order up a meal and sit down with the rest of our customers.” You can also barter for the cup of coffee and the meal – this is based on Oregon’s minimum wage, which is around six dollars an hour. So if you come in and volunteer an hour of your time, you get six dollars credit to put towards a meal. “It ‘s not a dollar, it’s not a wage exchange, it’s an exchange of work for meals in the cafe.” (info from Street Roots, January 1999, v 1, n 1). Phone them or drop in, 133 NW 6th.

Laughing Horse Books Volunteer run collective sells used/new books and periodicals dealing with political theory, environmentalism, labor history, queer, gender, and minority issues. Offers meeting space for local groups. 3652 SE Division – Portland, OR 97202.

City Bikes 1914 SE Ankeny – Portland, OR 97214.  Monday-Friday 11:00am- 7:00pm, Saturday-Sunday 11:00am-5:00pm.

City Bikes Annex Worker owned bike shop. Sells used bikes plus new and used parts. Offers repairs and bike repair classes. 734 SE Ankeny- Portland, OR 97214.

Independent Publishing Resource Center For a small membership fee you get access to a zine library, computers, presses and inks. Everything you need to start a zine or make your own handbills. 917 SW Oak St. #304.

Reading Frenzy Volunteer run. Has a wide selection of independently produced zines, comics, books and pamphlets. Has a good selection of anarchist related materials. 921 SW Oak St – Portland, OR 97205.

Journals

Fifth Estate Publishing out of Detroit since 1965 makes this one of the older active anarchist papers. Inside are anarchist views on our national and international social/political/ecological & economic milieu. Available at Laughing Horse Books.

Earth First! Journal The radical environmental journal – or the forum for the no compromise environmental movement. National and international coverage of environmental actions and events from a deep ecology slant, as well as news on the corporate world’s maneuverings to destroy the blue planet in search of a profit. Available at Laughing Horse Books.

Anarchy Magazine (C.A.L. Press – PO Box 466 Columbia, MO 65205-1446) More theory than news. This publication has been around for awhile. Published quarterly and available at Laughing Horse Books.

Slingshot (3124 Shattuck Ave Berkley, CA 94705;  website – http://burn.used.edu/~resistslingshot.html) Anarchist paper published quarterly by the Longhaul info shop. Provides national focus on the Berkley/San Francisco area. A good read full of anger and humor. Available at Laughing Horse Books.

Portland Alliance (NW Alliance for Alternative Media and Education – 2807 SE Stark St Portland, OR 97214) Local Portland paper covers local/national, and international events with a socialist/leftist slant. Published monthly and distributed around town (Laughing Horse Books, coffee shops, Laundromats). Contains monthly calendar of events.

Groups

Cascadia Forest Alliance works to inspire non-violent grass roots involvement in the protection of the forests of Cascadia. Meetings are held on the first and third Wednesdays of each month at 6:30pm at the Activists Resource Center, SW 3’d and Burnside. You can also pick-up a copy of their monthly publication Cascadia Forest Roots there.

Portland IWW (PO Box 15005 – Portland, OR 97293-5005) Local branch of the radical labor movement that’s been agitating for social revolution since 1905. They distribute the Industrial Worker and have weekly meetings on Mondays at 8:00pm.

Anarchist Black Cross (Portland ABC (SG)) – PO Box 40660 Portland, OR 97240; 287-6467) Provides info on political prisoners and encourages support of prisoners through letter writing campaigns and pen pals.

Liberation Collective is an all-volunteer, nonprofit organization dedicated to linking social justice movements to end all oppression. Focuses on nonviolent direct action and animal rights. Located at the Activist Resource Center- 2 NW 3rd Ave (corner of 3rd and Burnside) which houses their office and community activist library and low-cost merchandise. Mailing address PO Box 9055 Portland, OR 97207; website http://www.aracnet.com~libcoll/. Meetings second Tuesday of every month.

Peace and Justice Works (PJW) is a nonprofit corporation whose main purpose is to educate the general public on important issues including but not limited to: peace, justice, the environment, and human rights. Located at the Portland Alliance office – 2815 SE Stark. Mailing address: PO Box 42456 Portland, OR 97242; website http://www.rdrop.com/~pjw.

Portland Copwatch, a civilian group (an outgrowth of the People Overseeing Police Study Group) promoting police accountability through citizen action. Publishes People’s Justice Report. Meets the second and fourth Mondays of each month at the King Facility (4825 NE 7tt. – rm. 142) at 7:00pm. Incident report line: 321-5120; website http://www. teleport.com/~copwatch.

Iraq Affinity Group Meets first Tuesday of the month at the P JW office at 7: l 5pm. Protests sanctions on and continuing bombing of Iraq by the US government every Friday in front of the Federal Building (SW 3rd & and Jefferson) 4:00 – 6:00 pm. Website http://www.rdrop.com/~pjw/irag.html.

Portland Central American Solidarity Committee (PCASC) meets the second Wednesday of every month at 7:00pm at WOC office (8th and Burnside). Send mail to: 3558 SE Hawthorne Blvd Portland, OR 97214.

Cross Border Labor Organizing Coalition (CBLOC), a joint effort by PCASC and Jobs With Justice, meets first Wednesday of every month at 7:00pm at 5726 N Missouri. Address and phone same as PCASC.

Portland Jobs With Justice is a coalition of community organizations and labor unions that mobilize for all issues, mainly labor. Steering committee meets first Monday of every month, call for info and the more exciting sub-committees meeting times. Send mail to 815 NE Davis, Suite 200, Portland, OR 97232.

Fair Trade Coalition (anti-MAI) (anti-MAI) meets every second Thursday at 6:30pm at AFSCME, 815 NE Davis, Suite 200 Portland, OR 97232.

Emilio Zapata Anarchist Collective at Reed College – email [only]

Portland Free Mumia Coalition A group of concerned activists educating about the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and demanding a new trial, as well as issues about the death penalty and political prisoners. Weekly meetings: Sundays, 3:00pm at PSU Smith Memorial Food Court.

Chiapas Urgent Call Education and tabling in support of the Zapatistas (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico. Officially recognized by the National Commission in Mexico – the legal, US wing of the movement. English/Spanish co-learning class, Friday at 6:00pm at the Ainsworth United Church of Christ.

Portland Cacophony Society Trouble. Fun trouble. Creating situations and chaos through the provocation and the absurd. Last actions were dressing in postal worker uniforms and going to a gun show soon after postal shooting, and videotaping Santas in the woods shooting stuffed animals. Meetings: last Sunday of every month, 6:00pm-ish at the Alibi (4024 N Interstate), they have a newsletter.

Actions

Food Not Bombs Serves free, hot vegetarian (usually vegan) food and groceries to protest militarism and the unequal distribution of wealth. Wednesday: 5:00pm under the Burnside Bridge. Thursday: 5:30pm under the Burnside Bridge. Friday: 5:00pm under the Burnside Bridge, by Max tracks. Saturday: 5:00pm, Park Blocks (Park and Burnside). Sunday: 6:30pm, Park Blocks (Park and Burnside).

Spurcraft has an ongoing free school with classes in math, massage, drawing, foreign languages, yoga, etc. Pick-up a schedule at the Activist Resource Center.

Direct Action/Civil Disobedience Training for groups of 8 or more in preparation of negative developments in Mumia Abu Jamal’s situation. Contact the Portland Free Mumia Coalition.

Critical Mass Mass bike ride to demonstrate/educate about using bikes for daily transportation instead of cars. Meet: last Friday of every month under the Burnside Bridge (on Waterfront Park – by the maze) at 5:00pm.

Send Off/Pre-Birthday Party For Mumia MLK & Prescott, community room of McCoy Building, Thursday, April 22 from 5:00pm to 8:30pm, donations accepted.

Anarchist Reading Group Know your roots. Held every Sunday at 3:00pm at the Activist Resource Center – readings provided.

Portland General Anarchist Meeting

Meets the first Thursday of each month at Laughing Horse Books (email us to make sure of location). Open meetings to discuss current events, actions, and to network and generally share ideas with other Portland Anarchists.

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RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE:

A snapshot of what was going on in Portland, Oregon directly before the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle, which launched the anti-globalization movement. About one-quarter of the blockade groups there came directly from the Portland scene. Despite the dishonest claims of certain academics, the milieu that created those demonstrations was theoretically self-conscious of its political choices, and did not valorize “direct democracy” as a central idea — as this snapshot shows.

R.J. Lambrose – “Chomsky Unplugged” (1996)

Published September 8, 2015 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk , Theory Leave a Comment

As recently as the 1980s, the farthest an academic could make it in the world of popular culture would have been a brief appearance on the Today show to flog a new book. But cultural studies has changed all that. Now that professors have been churning out books and articles about rap, Elvis, and Madonna, the bemused performers are beginning to scratch the occasional academic back, or better, blurb the occasional academic book. Consider, for example, the quotes on the back cover of Michael Eric Dyson’s recent Making Malcolm, from Oxford University Press. In addition to the more predictable endorsements from Cornel West, Angela Davis, Jesse Jackson, and Carol Moseley-Braun, we also hear from Chuck D of Public Enemy: “With the situation getting more hectic, the real troopers come far and few. And with misinformation spreading, it is a necessity to follow Michael Eric Dyson. He’s a bad brother. Check out his new book Making Malcolm by all means.”R-468022-1118177447.jpg

The rappers’ reverence for cultural studies scholars hardly comes as a big surprise; Dyson, after all, testified on behalf of rap music at a congressional hearing in 1994. More startling, however, was the recent report that MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky is a major fave with top rock musicians. Rock & Rap Confidential magazine describes Chomsky—the embodiment, we had always thought, of old-fashioned leftist rectitude—as “a quote machine with all the rockers.” Chomsky’s anarchism has also made him a hero to punkers: Bad Religion put an entire Chomsky lecture on the B-side of one of their seven inch singles. And Maximum Rock’n’Roll, a leading fanzine with a circulation of 10,000, reprints Chomsky’s speeches for its Generation X readership. Other tributes abound: In 1994 an Austin-based band called The Horsies did a single they titled “Noam Chomsky.” U2’s Bono has called Chomsky a “rebel without a pause” and “the Elvis of academia.” And Peter Garrett, shaven-headed lead singer for the Australian rockers Midnight Oil, launched into a song called “My Country” at a Boston-area concert by invoking the following trinity: “Thoreau, Noam Chomsky, and…the Hulk!”

The Chomsky connection appears all the more remarkable when one learns more about the linguist’s own rather unusual relationship to mass culture. Because Chomsky can speed-read any document, he apparently grows impatient with the slowness of the fast-forward mode on a VCR. A friend who sought out a Chomsky blurb for a radical video was told by a go-between that the professor might consider wiring an endorsement after he read the script, but he refuses to screen films. He even declined to watch Manufacturing Consent, the documentary about him, and instead insisted the producers give him a transcript. (Unfortunately, he’ll never see Pulp Diction, Quentin Tarantino’s soon-to-be-released homage to Chomsky’s 1965 best-seller, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.)

All of this raises the intriguing question of whether Chomsky has vetted the rock encomiums to his work. If he has, we would guess that this means that there are now two people who actually read rock lyrics: Noam Chomsky and Tipper Gore.

= = =

Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life, May/June 1996, page 10.

Murray Bookchin, in praise of hippie “Youth Culture” and “life-style” (1970)

Published August 26, 2015 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk , Theory Leave a Comment
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hip cultureWe must break away from the traditional Marxian outlook, with its limited interpretation of the class struggle, of the motive forces for revolution, and of the revolutionary process, to understand the revolutionary implications of the Youth Culture. …

Nourished by the relative abundance produced by a new, potentially revolutionary technology, young people began to develop a post-scarcity outlook—however confused, rudimentary, and intuitive its forms—that has been slowly eroding the ages-old psychic complicity between oppressor and oppressed—a complicity that had made hierarchy, domination, patriarchy, renunciation, and guilt a condition of the human spirit, not only the institutional and psychological instruments of class-rule and the state. It is difficult to convey what a historic breach this emerging Youth Culture produced in the social desert that was once America. …

The explosion of the Youth Culture shattered this decade-long edifice and its mythology [i.e., the social conformity of the 1950s—RA] to their very foundations and, almost alone, is responsible for the massive alienation that permeates American youth today. For the first time in the history of this country, every verity not only of bourgeois society but of hierarchical society as a whole is now in question. Mere critique of the kind so endearing to the orthodox Marxists might have produced nothing more than a sense of cynical engagement, so similar to Salinger’s young hero in “Catcher in the Rye.” But the Youth Culture went further—into the realm of positive, utopian alternatives. In its demands for tribalism, free sexuality, community, mutual aid, ecstatic experience, and a balanced ecology, the Youth Culture prefigures, however inchoately, a joyous communist and classless society, freed of the trammels of hierarchy and domination, a society that would transcend the historic splits between town and country, individual and society, and mind and body. Drawing from early rock-and-roll music, from the beat movement, the civil rights struggles, the peace movement, and even from the naturalism of neo-Taoist and neo-Buddhist cults (however unsavory they may be to the “Left”), the Youth Culture has pieced together a life-style that is aimed at the internal system of domination that hierarchical society so viciously uses to bring the individual into partnership with his/her own enslavement. …

The Youth Culture has spread from the Haight-Eastside axis into the most remote towns of the United States, areas that no radical movement in the past could have hoped to colonize, disrupting all the time-honored ties, institutions, and values of these communities. Owing to its increasing influence on working class youth, the culture has now begun to rework the labor reserves of bourgeois society itself—the reservoirs from which it recruits its industrial proletariat and soldiers—until recently, perhaps the most intractable element to radical ideas and values.

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Murray Bookchin, “The Youth Culture: An Anarcho-Communist View,” in Hip Culture: 6 Essays on Its Revolutionary Potential; Yippie, Third World, Feminist, Marxist, High School Student, Anarchist (New York: Times Change Press, 1970), 54, 55, 58–59, 60.

RADICAL ARCHIVES NOTE: Bookchin became quite well-known late in life for his scathing attacks on a bogeyman he called “lifestylism”—a ridiculous strawman composed of wildly disparate parts of the early 1990s anarchist milieu, united mostly by the fact that he didn’t like them. But Bookchin’s early, favorable view of the 1960s counterculture made a coherent argument in favor of its potential, and, if it had a failure, it was that it was too uncritical in its assessment.

Chumbawamba, the Pentagon, and the Bombing of Iraq (1998)

Published February 18, 2015 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk Leave a Comment
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“Martial Music”

The tentative U.S. military campaign against Iraq already has its own unofficial theme song. Last week, senior Pentagon staffers privately circulated an audio-file E-mail with a pro-war parody of “Tubthumping,” a hit from the British band Chumbawamba. The blend of drinking song and rugby cheer (“I get knocked down, but I get up again”) has been transformed into a jingoistic war cry: “Let’s hunt him down and shoot him in the head, / Let’s beat the crap outta Saddam…. And if he won’t let us look for all his nerve gas / The U.S. Army is gonna kick him in the a–.” An ethereal voice chimes in with “Don’t screw with the U.S.A.”

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U.S. News and World Report, March 2, 1998

Ian Bone: How Crass’s Penny Rimbaud Saved EP Thompson from Being Decapitated by Class War

Published June 6, 2014 Anarchism , Counterculture & Punk , Marxism Leave a Comment
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[Ian Bone describes how Class War is being confrontational towards speakers at a CND rally in Hyde Park in October, 1983]

Next up is silver-mained EP Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class, a book we all hold in great esteem and whose mob traditions we even feel we’re part of. But no matter—[Class War’s] Doc Whelan’s limited patience threshold has well and truly been breached. He has a glass cider flagon which he was reserving for Kinnockio [Neil Kinnock] but decided ‘some fucking professor’ will do just as well for a target. He has a sighting heave with a piece of concrete which whistles past EP Thompson’s locks on a still rising trajectory. He starts to spin like a hammer thrower with the flagon as the hammer. EP Thompson’s health is seriously at risk, and I’m doing fuck all to protect one of my favorite writers from decapitation. Thankfully, others aren’t so paralyzed. A firm arm grabs Doc’s wrist—a move usually likely to incur the dreaded Whelan forehead crunching down on the bridge of your nose. Doc recognizes the owner of the arm as Penny Rimbaud. ‘He’s not the one that deserves that,’ says Penny, ‘save it for later.’ Wise words and Doc concurs.

= = =

Ian Bone, Bash the Rich: True-Life Confessions of an Anarchist in the UK (Bath, UK: Tangent Books, 2006), pp 139-40.

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