The Anarchist Library

Author: Firebrand Publishing Committee
Title: The Firebrand: Vol. 3, No. 5 (March 7, 1897)
Subtitle: For the Burning Away of the Cobwebs of Superstition and Ignorance.
Date: March 7, 1897
Source: <https://libcom.org/article/firebrand-free-society-journal>
A Legend A knave and a fool on an island were cast;
Their ship had gone down in the hurricane’s blast.

On the island they met, while hungry and wet,
A wise man who aid to them gave;
They were given a home, with the freedom to roam,
Bounded by naught but the wave.

The fool, though demented, was easily contented
To live in this beautiful land:
But the knave was a schemer (there’s plenty lots meaner);
He thought out a wonderful plan.

Said the knave to the fool: “It’s plain that some rule
Must govern society here,
Else murder we’ll do—Anarchy ensue—
A government is needed, I fear.”

The fool was demented, and of course he consented,
But the wise man opposed it alone;
His logic was parried, for the measure was carried
Over the minority of one.

Now none but a fool, or a knave wants to rule,
For a wise man knows better than that;
So the knave was elected, for no fool is selected
To wear a governor’s hat.

The knave, as a state, was something quite great,
The fool was lost in surprise;
As he looked on in awe, for the majesty of law
Quite blinded and dazzled his eyes.

But states are expensive, and the fool was quite pensive
When the tax collector called round,
And took all his money, (and it wasn’t quite funny)—
As payment for using the ground.

E’re long the poor fool, by means of the rule
Of this cunning knave of a state,
Was reduced to a slave and made work for the knave,
From early morning till late.

The wise man foresaw that the knave and his law
Would drive from the island its peace;
He was branded a hater of law, and a traitor,
For whom toleration should cease.

The fool patriotic, and quite idiotic—
(Synomomous terms I declare,)
Was ready with chains, and the law’s legal pains,
To fasten his own despair,

And to kill with a blow, first his enemy’s foe,
And his own true defender and friend;
To preserve the knave’s law, which he worshiped in awe
And to the gallows the hero did send.

Ross Winn.

Why I am an Anarchist.

We find ourselves in a world of conflicting ideas, and every person who has individuality enough developed to be more, in human life, than a domestic animal or lifeless machine, must align himself with others who hold the same opinions, whether he will or not, and then he is in the view of others, and perhaps in his own view, labeled with the name of the idea he holds. So we find that nearly every person is labeled, and some persons have a number of labels.

Finding that we must be something—must hold to certain ideas and work for certain ends—if we work at all, or amount to any more in human life than an ox, or an ax, it very naturally follows that we will adopt and work for the prevalence of such ideas as will bring us the greatest happiness, now or bye and bye. That is why I am an Anarchist. I am convinced that to work for the realization of the Anarchist ideal will bring me more satisfaction than an adherence to, or working for, any other ideal would bring me.

But every one should be able and willing to give a reason for the “faith that is within him,” and I will try and do so.

I find myself in a world of sunshine and shade; of joy and sorrow; of happiness and woe. All around me I see fellow beings; beings that are constituted very much as I am, have similar desires, hopes and aspirations. I find that they are constantly trying to gratify these desires; to realize their hopes and attain to that for which they aspire. I find further that they can do these things only by exploiting inorganic nature, and by assisting each other. I find that as things are now, these beings instead of mutually assisting each other are constantly striving to injure each other, not because they take delight in the suffering of a fellow, but because they see no other way of satisfying their desires and aspirations. They think this state of affairs wrong, and are constantly clamoring for a change, but have not yet learned the great fundamental fact of human solidarity—of our interdependence.

Long have the various members of the human family sought to adjust themselves to environment, and of late have begun to endeavor to adjust the environment to suit themselves. All mankind craves for freedom, but most of the people have sought to gain freedom by subjugating others, or by restricting all alike. They have not learned that they cannot be free while they are holding others, or while they seek to restrict the freedom of others. No one desires to be injured, and yet no one can be secure from injury as long as he injures others. We all wish to be free from injury. I crave for freedom. I see that others want the same condition, and I know that my freedom can be made secure only by the freedom of all others. I know of no other ideal but Anarchy that, if really would secure freedom to me and to all others, therefore I am an Anarchist.

I long for plenty; for a sufficiency of the material necessities of life to make it possible for me to satisfy all my physical cravings, and I know that all others want the same thing. I see that the Earth yields abundantly; that it is possible for human beings to produce all the material necessities required to satisfy their physical cravings, and that if they would stop restricting and interfering with each other and turn their attention to production and mutual assistance, they could have every material comfort they desire. Anarchy is the only theory that, if put into practice, would secure this abundance and at the same time secure full liberty. Consequently I am an Anarchist.

...

Author: K. C. Sinclair
Title: Missing the Anti-Colonial Point of Historic Anarchist Debates
Date: 2026
Source: Retrieved on November 8, 2026 from historykeepshappening.wordpress.com

Given that we live in a society that promotes ignorance and superficiality, perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising that current day anarchist discussions of historic inter-anarchist debates usually miss the point when it comes to colonialism (and imperialism more generally.)

Anarchists do not somehow become immune to colonial society’s influence simply by making abstract and hollow declarations of opinion. Knowledge and comprehension require actual commitment and curiosity, and these are sadly rare qualities among the European, Euro-American and Euro-Canadian anarchists of today.

This article is an attempt at a brief analysis of what’s been missing in recent anarchist discussions of three historic inter-anarchist debates. The term “debates” is used here in the widest sense of a general disagreement rather than some formally-held event or correspondence. Specifically, I refer to the debates between Luigi Galleani and Ricardo Flores Magón over the Mexican Revolution, between Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta on the First World War, and between Emma Goldman and Reginald Reynolds on Palestine.

In the case of Reynolds, we should note that he considered himself a fellow traveler and sympathizer of anarchism, wrote regularly for the anarchist periodicals edited by Vernon Richards, and married the socialist-turned-anarchist Ethel Mannin, but did not self-identify as an anarchist, so my phrase “inter-anarchist debate” must also be understood in the broadest sense.

The Mexican Revolution

The anarchist periodical Tinderbox and the anarchist website The Transmetropolitan Review (TTR) have recently invoked the Galleani-Magón debate, though without even being aware of it in the former case.

The individual who writes articles at the TTR website claimed in May of this year that the historic anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) made a “fateful alliance with Pascual Orozco,” the latter being a bourgeois revolutionary who, with the help of Pancho Villa, took control of Ciudad Juárez in 1911. The author makes no distinction between the on-the-ground forces of the PLM and the Junta (leadership board) of that organization, which, from Los Angeles obviously could not directly control the actions of every individual on the frontlines in Mexico, even if they had wanted to.

TTR goes on to sell the lie that at the time, “the PLM was willing to work with anyone against Madero, and they took positions in Orozco’s rebel government alongside oligarchs and hacienda owners, something which further isolated the PLM from anarchists.”

In reality, Magón and the rest of the Junta, in their periodical, Regeneración, called for violent resistance to Orozco once he took control of Juárez, denouncing him as bourgeois and openly accusing him of being on the wrong side of the revolution, specifically because he was trying to disarm other revolutionaries and was friendly with the rich.

To be clear where TTR wasn’t, the anarchists they claim the PLM isolated themselves from are specifically the Italian-American anarchists associated with the periodical, Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), edited by Galleani.

TTR seems to forget for a moment that the PLM, or at least its Junta, were anarchists too, so they technically could not become isolated from themselves as individual anarchists even if they could become isolated from Italian-American anarchists. In reality, it was the Italian-American anarchists who chose to isolate themselves from the Mexican anarchists and the social revolution in Mexico as a whole, because the Italian-Americans were racist and ignorant regarding the dynamics of social revolution, particularly Indigenous, peasant and rural revolution.

Some of the Italian-Americans had traveled to Mexico to take part in the revolution but then returned home to slander it in the pages of Galleani’s periodical, much to his approval. TTR, with their false claims about bourgeois collaboration, soft-pedals the racism that the Italian-American anarchists used to justify their opposition to the PLM and their denigration of the Mexican Revolution in general. It can’t be that TTR is merely unaware of this racism, because they have already specifically mentioned it earlier in their article.

The author openly admits that in the pages of Cronaca Sovversiva, “month by month, the language grew more insulting and venomous, as well as racist.”

TTR even discuses a racist quote from Galleani, but fails to mention that this quote had already been discussed by historian Kenyon Zimmer in his 2015 book, Immigrants Against the State. Galleani, in his periodical, had preposterously claimed that a less industrial country like Mexico, populated primarily by Indigenous peoples, mestizos and Black people (of various ancestries), was less likely to engage in a social revolutionary movement than a more industrial country populated primarily by white people.

TTR, furthermore, falsely claims that “the involvement of Italian anarchists in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 is a moment in history that remains obscure not just to contemporary anarchists, but also to academic historians.” This is ironic given that TTR rarely provides citations or references for any academic (or otherwise) documentation that they draw from, and several academics have in fact written something, in various languages, about the Galleani-Magón debate, for example Zimmer, as just mentioned.

...

Author: M Rizky Sasono
Title: Anarchism and Democracy in Indonesia: An Underground Perspective
Date: October, 2022
Source: "Smash the System! Punk Anarchism as a Culture of Resistance." ed: Jim Donaghey, Will Boisseau, Caroline Kaltefleiter

This chapter scrutinizes musical narratives that emphasize the underground as a political space that strives for ‘democracy’, particularly the processes of democracy during the period of political reform known as Reformasi in Indonesia 1998, and the notion of democracy in the domain of do-it-yourself (DIY) music production in twenty-first-century Indonesia. These narratives illuminate the ways in which anarchism is manifested in the sphere of the underground and what it means to be democratic. I employ the term ‘underground’ as an overarching setting of musical cases where anarchism is identifiable. Rather than a top-down explication of anarchism and democracy, I opt for a descriptive narrative from below – accounts of those who are exponents of the underground, aesthetically and politically. Hence, the title of this chapter: ‘an underground perspective’.

The first section traces underground activism against President Suharto’s New Order regime in the period leading up to ‘Reformasi’ – music was central to resistance against the authoritarian regime. Political protests during the late-New Order (1994-1998) were characterized by the existence of underground organizations, many of which were led by student activists (Lane, 2008; Lee, 2016). However, this narrative of students as agents of change obscures the history of non-students who participated in and contributed to the escalation of pressures that forced President Suharto to resign and gave hope for democracy in Indonesia. It eliminates the participation of marginalized groups whose struggles were not limited to student-organized protests, but for whom struggle became part of their everyday lives. Here, the narratives of anarchism and democracy in the late- New Order period are focused on the underground struggles of street buskers (pengamen), as some of the most oppressed members of society.

The term ‘democracy’ generally revolves around power, its entitlement and how power is appointed among, or delegated to, the people. In the ideal (representative) democracy, institutions such as the state serve the rights of its citizens, and these rights are not dependent on the policies of the current government. Despite their emphasis on rights and the state, discourses of democracy also cross over with libertarian socialist anarchism in their demand for freedom and social equality (Rooum, 2014, p. 14), though anarchists usually strive towards participatory democracy, rather than representative forms. In the case of Indonesia, however, Suharto’s ‘Demokrasi Pancasila’ failed to serve the ‘sovereignty of the people’, and the 32 years of the New Order regime (1966-1998) decayed into growing feudalism and fascism (Vltchek, 2012, pp. 38-39). This highlights the anarchist critique of ‘democratic’ state systems whose sovereignty is, in the words of Bakunin, ‘wholly fictitious’ and which ‘continue to serve as the instrument of thoughts, wills, and consequently interests not [their] own’ (Bakunin, 1970 [1882], p. 40). To counter the mischiefs of statist or representative democracy, anarchists prioritize concepts such as horizontalism and collectivism, stressing principles of autonomy, voluntary association, self-organization, and mutual aid (Graeber, 2009, p. 105). The development brought by post-anarchists sees anarchism move beyond classical philosophy towards more practicable, grounded forms of anarchist theory (Lazaar, 2018, p. 160), and this anarchism also widens the main objective of opposing power beyond merely the state or economic power, incorporating all forms of power exercised by one group over another (May, 1994, p. 168). In moments of social upheaval, such as the protests leading to Reformasi in Indonesia, themes central to democracy and anarchism come to the fore, and, crucially, they take on particular meaning for the people in their daily lives. The example of pengamen street buskers in and around the 1998 protest movement is an interesting example of this.

The second section of this chapter revolves around post-anarchism in the field of cultural production, examining a manifestation of ‘audio anarchy’ against the backdrop of early-twenty-first-century neoliberal Indonesia. DIY music production can be understood as a response to the dominance of the capitalist music industry and its power over musicians and popular tastes. As such, DIY production endeavors for control over the means of production, and control over means of representation, through ‘a vision of a desired society which is participatory and democratic’ (Shantz, 2010, p. 164). Here, I will be focusing on Yogyakarta-based label Yes No Wave (YNW), who practice alternative forms of music production, and Senyawa, an experimental-punk group closely associated with the label, who strive for decentralization in their DIY music production. The socio-history of YNW and Senyawa exemplifies underground values of anti-capitalism and the democratized political economy of DIY. While DIY processes of production, distribution, and consumption have been understood as counter to capitalism, not all DIY music making can be considered as anarchist (Jeppesen, 2018). In this regard, the investigation into the political economy of the musicians discussed includes, and contributes to, the idea of DIY-as-anarchism, which in Jeppesen’s view must include oppositional content, aesthetic experiments, community practice, anti-hierarchical organizational structures, prefigurative processes, anti-capitalist economics, and direct action (Jeppesen, 2018, p. 207).

...

Author: Freedom Press
Title: Serbian anarchists: Student List “perfectly in line” with neoliberalism
Date: 11/4/26
Source: https://freedompress.org.uk/2026/11/04/serbian-anarchists-student-list-perfectly-in-line-with-neoliberalism/

On 25 October, the “Student List” won a projected 140 of 250 seats in the Serbian parliament, defeating the ruling party that has been in power for 14 years. The electoral victory comes on the back of a student movement that began on 1 of November 2024, when a newly renovated canopy fell at the railway station in Novi Sad and killed sixteen people. Since then, people in Serbia have organised mass protests and assemblies.

We reached out to Klasna Solidarnost (Class Solirarity), founded in Belgrade in 2016, which grew out of an anarcho-syndicalist movement. Its members continue to participate in student occupations while critiquing electoral strategies. They are also active in antifascism, solidarity with Palestine, antimilitarism, support for workers, and the “Solidarna kuhinja” free kitchen, as well as political analysis and publications.

The mainstream media has presented the student movement as “decentralised” and highlighted the appointing of non-politicians to parliament; is this an accurate reflection of the movement now?

The appointment of non-politicians to parliament is one of the main talking points of the Student List. There were over 160 candidates with PhDs on the list, which was highlighted as a key reason why the new government should be “better” than the old one in which it turned out that even some ministers had fake PhD diplomas. The Student List basically has a technocratic structure and by what we’ve seen so far, it aims to create a “government of experts” which is perfectly in line with the dominant neoliberal ideology that convinces us that the society will be better as a whole if we have experts leading the government.

For us as anarchists, this of course is a fairy tale because we know how technocratic governments ended in countries like Italy and Greece in the last 10-15 years, where they simply ushered in the most brutal neoliberal reforms, bringing down the life standard of the working class even more than their predecessors. And this is actually one of the key elements that show us there probably won’t be much improvement in the working class’s life standard.

During the Student List’s electoral campaign, the focus was on defeating the political mafia regime of the SNS (Serbian Progressive Party), which had been in power for 14 years. The movement focused on the regime’s criminal acts and massive corruption scandals, but it barely mentioned any economic measures to improve the everyday lives of the working class.

Now that the SNS regime is finally gone, it remains to be seen what the economic policy of the new government will be, but from what we’ve heard so far, there isn’t any mention of substantial changes in the economic position of Serbia as a client-state of the European Union, and a partial economic partner of the US, China, and Russia.

How does it compare to former “decentralised” parliamentary movements such as Podemos in Spain?

It’s quite problematic for us that a decentralised, direct-democratic movement ended up fighting to replace one capitalist elite in power with another. Compared with Podemos, one key difference is that Podemos was explicitly a leftist movement addressing some of the working class’s pain points in Spain. Of course, as all leftist movements that participate in capitalist parliamentary politics, they ended up in reactionary politics, without introducing any benefits for the working class once they gained power.

The Student List, on the other hand, isn’t leftist in any way. It’s essentially a broad liberal right-wing candidate list, which may well split into different factions once the government is formed. In fact, given the major differences between candidates, it would be logical to see the Student List establish multiple political parties, ranging from extreme neoliberal to centre-right and conservative. There isn’t an even remotely left-wing current among the Student List candidates.

First student plenum in Belgrade, November 2024 (from Klasna Solidarnost)

One of the key lessons from the history of the movement in Serbia for us as anarchists is that in the absence of a massive anarchist movement capable of effectively participating in the assemblies, the dominant, neoliberal ideology and its political forces were the ones who won, despite the movement being based on anarchist organising methods. The method isn’t enough if you don’t have a movement capable of articulating the ideology behind it. We saw how an anarchist organising method was abused to oust one pro-EU capitalist government and install another pro-EU capitalist government in power.

Can you tell us about decentralised organisation in Serbia in general: what are Zborovi and plenums? How widespread have these sorts of leaderless structures become?

Zborovi and plenums are the same thing, just in different contexts. Both words mean “direct-democratic assembly”. A plenum is a student assembly of a specific faculty, while a zbor is a people’s assembly, usually for a specific neighborhood or a small town.

...

Author: Anonymous
Title: We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years
Subtitle: Travels of a Protest Poem
Source: KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library No. 122, October 2026
A Humble Reminder : To the Propertied Classes

(Slightly altered from Rudyard Kipling’s Ode in praise of English Enterprise.)

We have fed you all for a thousand years,
And you hail us still unfed,
Though there’s never a pound of all your pounds
But marks the workers’ dead;
We have yielded our best to give you rest,
And you lie on a crimson wool,
For if blood be the price of England’s wealth,
Good God, we ha’ paid in full.

There’s never a mine blown skyward now
But we’re buried alive for you;
There’s never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But it’s we are the ghastly crew;
Go, reckon our dead by the forges red,
And the factories where we spin;
If blood be the price of England’s wealth,
Good God, we ha’ paid it in.

We have fed you all for a thousand years,
For that was our doom, you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike of a week ago;
You have eaten our lives and our babes and wives,
And we’re told it’s your legal share;
But if blood be the price of England’s wealth,
Good God, we ha’ bought it fair.

N.

 

In September 1893 the London anarchist newspaper Freedom : A Journal of Anarchist Communism published a poem called ‘A Humble Reminder : To the Propertied Classes’, credited to ‘N.’[1] It’s an anti-capitalist protest, lamenting the ‘workers’ dead’ whose deaths enriched those ‘propertied classes’. It rails at the rich ‘We have fed you all for a thousand years, / And you hail us still unfed’. I do not know who ‘N.’ was, though they seem to be connected to the Freedom milieu. Freedom had published another poem by them, ‘The Pet Voter’, in August 1892.[2] Max Nettlau used the same initial when writing in Freedom in June 1891; the Fabian socialist Edith Nesbit had a poem ‘A Word For The Children’ in Freedom in February 1891 (‘The right to give help is your own, / The right to claim it theirs.’) Neither seems a convincing candidate for the authorship of this poem.

The Kipling connection

‘N.’ introduced their poem by saying it was ‘slightly altered from Rudyard Kipling’s Ode in praise of English Enterprise.’ That’s a reference to Kipling’s ‘Song of the Dead’ published four months earlier in The English Illustrated Magazine (May 1893). ‘N.’s address to the propertied classes ‘For if blood be the price of England’s wealth, / Good God, we ha’ paid in full’ rewrites Kipling’s address to the sea ‘If blood be the price of admiralty, / Lord God, we ha’ paid in full!’.[3] The ‘Humble Reminder’ changes Kipling’s poem – but leans heavily upon it. Mark Leier said ‘strictly speaking the poem is not a parody of Kipling’s poem but a re-working of the words based on the original verse and meter.’[4] It reminds me of Utah Philips’ comment on IWW songmaking: ‘The Wobblies liked to steal the hymn tunes ‘cos they were pretty and change the words so they made more sense.’[5]

The connection to Kipling persisted. He was credited in many of the reprints (inevitable, perhaps, given that the author remained unknown and their debt to Kipling was clear). There were even articles discussing what it would mean if the poem were by Kipling.[6]

Reprinted and recited

Once printed, it was always possible for the poem to reappear, and this one spread beyond the anarchist press, becoming a standard of labour movement papers. The title often changed, varying from ‘The Cry of Toil’ to ‘The Capitalist’. Just as the connection to Kipling is sometimes there and sometimes not, the text varies between the poetic ‘ha’’ to the everyday ‘have’.

Apparently a version was published in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1895.[7] The Portland anarchist newspaper The Firebrand reprinted the poem (anonymously) as ‘The Workers Outcry’ in 1897.[8] Changes had been made to Americanise the text: instead of pounds the third line talks of ‘there’s never a dollar of all your wealth’.

Sometimes you can read about the poem’s life off the printed page. In May 1897 Miss Olive Keep recited ‘We have fed you all for a thousand years’ at a gathering of the Socialist Labor Party. [9]. In August 1899, The Carpenter, a union journal for ‘Carpenters, Stair Builders, Machine Wood Workers, Planing Mill Men, and Kindred Interests’ reprinted the ‘Firebrand version’ (with credit).[10] In 1904 the poem reappeared as ‘The Price of England’s Wealth’ in Glasgow’s The Voice of Labour.[11] This version talks of ‘sovereigns’ rather than ‘pounds’ or ‘dollars’ but there are other changes: I can’t tell if it’s rewritten from the Freedom or Firebrand version.

The anarchist journal Mother Earth (‘published every 15th of the month’) reprinted ‘The Cry of Toil’ (credited to Kipling) in April 1908.[12] On April 18, 1908 it appeared in the IWW’s Industrial Union Bulletin (also credited to Kipling).[13] Once the poem was reprinted in the IWW songbook, and was later put to music (‘about 1916’ by Rudolf von Liebich), it was firmly established as a classic of working class protest.

In November 1913 strikers in Auckland used a line from the poem on their banner during the 1913 Waterfront Strike: ‘If blood be the price of your cursed wealth, good God we have bought it fair’.[14] It’s not often we get the names of people who helped circulate the text but ‘Gordon’ suggested it (as ‘The Workers’ Answer’) in the 1917 compilation New songs for Butte Mining Camp.[15]

...

Welcome to The Anarchist Library

Announcing the Nepali language anarchist library (November 2026)

The Anarchist Library on torrent:

Torrent link: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/torrent/tal.torrent

Magnet link (text): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/torrent/tal.torrent

More information at The Anarchist Library on torrent bookshelf page

Author: Malcolm Archibald
Title: Atamansha
Subtitle: The life of Marusya Nikiforova
Date: 2007
Source: http://nestormakhno.info/english/marusya.htm
Introduction

The Ukrainian anarchist Maria Nikiforova (1887–1919) has sometimes been compared to Joan of Arc. Like Joan she started from humble origins and, improbably, became a ferocious military commander who was captured and executed by her sworn enemies. And, like Joan, she was a fanatic who pursued her goals in a violent, ruthless fashion.

But there is no cult of Maria Nikiforova. There are no shelves of books devoted to her life in any language. Although she played a prominent role in the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent Civil War, she was virtually expunged from Soviet histories of the period. A biographical dictionary of the Russian Revolution published in the Soviet Union which includes hundreds of names does not mention her, indeed mentions only a couple of dozen women. There are entries on the Bolshevik heroines Alexandra Kollontai, Larissa Reissner, and Inessa Armand but none of these women held independent military commands like Nikiforova.

There is no scholarly biography of Maria Nikiforova, no historiography of her life which only needs to be updated and possibly reinterpreted. Partly this is because she spent most of her life in the underground: she joined an anarchist terrorist group at age 16 and was really only "above ground" for two years (1917-1919). So there are very few documents to trace her activities and almost no photos. Recognition can be fatal for a terrorist and so it was for Nikiforova in the end. Such accounts of her life which exist are usually found in memoir literature or fiction. Most of these accounts are hostile to Nikiforova and tend to depict her as repulsive and evil.

Nikiforova was a Ukrainian and her activities in the Russian Revolution and Civil War took place mostly in Ukraine but she has been largely ignored by Ukrainian historians. She was anti-nationalist and, like the Ukrainian anarchist movement in general, she couldn't be assimilated to a nationalist historical perspective.

Even writers sympathetic to anarchism have, as a rule, neglected her. Although she was closely associated with the famous peasant anarchist Nestor Makhno, books about Makhno scarcely mention her. And yet in 1918 Nikiforova was already famous as an anarchist atamansha (military leader) throughout Ukraine, while Makhno was still a rather obscure figure operating in a provincial backwater. She is absent from the works of Peter Arshinov, Volin, and Paul Avrich. Alexandre Skirda's book on Makhno mentions her but only devotes one paragraph to her in a work of 400 pages. Exceptions to the rule are Makhno himself and his former adjutant Victor Belash. In his memoirs (which only cover 22 months of revolution and civil war) Makhno provides eye-witness accounts of a number of dramatic incidents in which Nikiforova played a leading role. Belash, whose work was rescued from the files of the Soviet secret police, also presents primary source material about her.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been tremendous interest in Russia and Ukraine in filling in the "white patches" in their history. Makhno and Nikiforova have benefited from this interest with many books on Makhno being published and a few essays on Nikiforova. The archives have yielded some solid information; for example, Nikiforova's service record exists since she was once a member of the Red Army. Gradually a clearer picture of her life is coming to light and it is possible to establish a reasonably reliable narrative although many ambiguities remain.

The following sketch of Nikiforova's life is based mainly on secondary sources published in Russian and Ukrainian in the last two decades.

The Young Terrorist

According to tradition, Maria Grigorevna Nikiforova was born in the Ukrainian city of Aleksandrovsk in 1885, the daughter of an officer who had been a hero of the last Russo-Turkish War. Although this story might help to explain her later martial ardour, it seems unlikely. For even the daughter of an impoverished officer would be unlikely to leave home at 16 to earn a living on our own as Maria did.

At the turn of the 19th century, Aleksandrovsk was a rapidly industrializing city with a large and militant working class population. Under the conditions of the time there was little paid work for women, but Maria was able to find employment as a baby sitter, sales clerk and, finally, a bottle washer in a vodka distillery.

Around the same time she became a factory worker, Nikiforova also joined a local group of anarcho-communists. This political tendency was distinguished from other left-wing groups, including other anarchists, by the belief that human society had already reached a level that could allow an immediate transition to communism. Anarcho-communist organizers first appeared in Ukraine in 1903 and enjoyed considerable success among the working class youth of industrial centres. During the revolutionary events of 1905-07 there were as many as 90 anarcho-communist groups in Ukraine, more numerous and better-organized than their counterparts in Russia.

...

Author: Ken Knabb
Title: The Relevance of Rexroth
Date: 1990
Notes: Originally published in 1990, reprinted in 1998 in Public Secrets: Collected Skirmished of Ken Knabb
Source: https://bopsecrets.org/PS/Rexroth.htm

Chapter 1: Life and Literature
Brief biography. What he was like in person. His poetry. Opposition to Pound, Eliot, and academia. Remarkable variety and liveliness of his essays. Views on Blake, Baudelaire, Whitman, Henry Miller, etc.

Chapter 2: Magnanimity and Mysticism
Magnanimity as central theme of his life and works. Mystical experiences. Views on Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, psychedelics, pseudosciences, D.H. Lawrence, Martin Buber, etc.

Chapter 3: Society and Revolution
His opposition to Bolshevism. His anarchist perspectives and activities. Views on the Beats, the sixties counterculture, ecology, underground songs, etc. Ambiguity of his position as public social critic. Limits of his social analyses and of his notion of cultural subversion.

Chapter 1: Life and Literature

REXROTH (before reading his poetry): “Well, what would you like tonight, sex, mysticism, or revolution?”

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: “What’s the difference?”

Kenneth Rexroth was born in Indiana in 1905, descended from a variety of abolitionists, socialists, anarchists, feminists and freethinkers. After an unusually enlightened upbringing he was orphaned at the age of twelve. He spent most of his teenage years in Chicago, where he worked as a newspaper reporter and helped run a jazz coffee house, mingling with the musicians, artists, writers, radicals and eccentrics who made up the bohemian world of the twenties. Almost totally self-educated (he had only five years of formal schooling), he read omnivorously, wrote poetry, did abstract painting, worked in avant-garde theater and began teaching himself several languages. In his late teens he hitched all over the country, spending summers in the Far West working as a cowboy cook and wrangler and at various farm and forestry jobs, and once worked his way to Paris and back.

He recounts these early adventures in An Autobiographical Novel. The first impression you get is that it is mostly about other people — Louis Armstrong, Alexander Berkman, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs, Marcel Duchamp, Emma Goldman, D.H. Lawrence, Diego Rivera, Carl Sandburg, Edward Sapir, Sacco and Vanzetti all turn up briefly, along with an Indian woman who introduces him to sexual yoga, a member of the Bugs Moran gang who later retires to Hollywood as a consultant for gangster movies, a talkative poet who says he has belonged to “the three most gossipy organizations in modern life, the Anglo-Catholics, the Trotskyites, and the homosexuals,” and a multitude of others — anarchists, Communists, Wobblies, dadaists, surrealists, occultists, prostitutes, crooks, cops, judges, jailers, hoboes, hillbillies, lumberjacks, cowboys, Indians. . . . It’s a fascinating book, not only for its account of Rexroth’s own incredible range of experiences, but for its evocation of a radical-libertarian American subculture that passed away in the early years of the century and for its glimpses of the 1920s bohemianism that foreshadowed the later worldwide counterculture. “What I was witnessing was the development in a few places in Chicago, New York, and Paris of a culture pattern that was to spread all over the world. In another generation all professional people of any pretense to bohemianism in Sydney or Oslo did the things we did, but back in those days we all knew one another.”

An Autobiographical Novel leaves off in 1927 [a later edition brings the story up to 1949], when Rexroth moved to San Francisco. (He said he liked it because it was accessible to the Western mountains, remote from New York cultural domination, and virtually the only major American city that was not settled by puritans but by “gamblers, prostitutes, rascals, and fortune seekers.”) In the thirties and forties he played an active role in a number of libertarian, civil rights and antiwar groups (during World War II he was a conscientious objector), and he was the leading spirit in the literary and cultural ferment that led to the postwar San Francisco Renaissance. During the fifties and sixties he wrote poems, plays, essays and social criticism, translated poetry from seven languages, presented book reviews and other programs over noncommercial radio KPFA, and pioneered the reading of poetry to jazz.

In 1968 he moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he taught courses in underground poetry and song. Apart from several extended visits to Japan, he lived there until his death in 1982.

* * *

I was fortunate enough to get to know him a little in the sixties, when I attended a class he was giving at San Francisco State College. He had been at odds with academia all his life (he called the universities “fog factories”), but by this time his stature was so undeniable and there was such a demand for “relevance” in education that he was allowed to create whatever course he wanted. His “class,” which was certainly more instructive than any other I ever took, consisted simply of open-ended discussions of anything and everything, along with occasional other activities such as group dramatic performances.

...

Author: Anatoly Dubovik
Title: Fire and Passion
Subtitle: The Life of Ukrainian Anarchist Maria Nikiforova
Date: 17 September 2024
Notes: Originally published in Russian on Akrateia in a slightly different version. Translated by Malcolm Archibald.
Source: Retrieved on 7th November 2026 from freedompress.org.uk

Maria Nikiforova is perhaps the most famous female anarchist who operated on the territory of the former Russian Empire and Ukraine. This is probably why many legends and outright fictions arose around the personality of this legendary anarchist, some of which we will try to dispel in this article.

Maria Hryhorivna Nikiforova was born in 1888 (possibly 1885). Her precise place of birth is unknown. According to some sources, it was the town of Pechenikovo, Starodubskyi district, Chernihiv province; according to others, she was born in the village of Levshikovo, Oleksandrivskyi district, Katerynoslav province.

There exists a romantic version of her origins that Nikiforova came from the nobility and that at the age of 16, she fell in love with an officer, ran away from home, was abandoned by her lover and was forced to earn a living on her own—as a nanny, a street vendor, and a bottle washer at a vodka factory. In reality, Nikiforova was the daughter of a peasant, and the only education she received, in her own words, was in the home. There is simply no other reliable information about her early youth.

In the early 1900s, while working as a seamstress, Nikiforova joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), then switched to the anarch0- communists. This happened either in Oleksandrivsk city (now Zaporizhzhia) or Katerynoslav (now Dnipro). She was an agitator, then joined a fighting squad and participated in terrorist attacks against the local bourgeoisie and the police. By 1907, Nikiforova lived in Starodub, where she was one of the leaders of a revolutionary group that included young anarchists, SRs and SR Maximalists. They conducted propaganda among the city’s workers and the neighbouring settlement of Klintsy, as well as engaged in armed actions.

In Starodub, Nikiforova was arrested for the first time in 1907 while trying to commit suicide—fortunately, unsuccessfully. Accusations of terror carried the threat of the death penalty, so Maria insisted to the investigators and the medical commission that she was born in 1889. This made her a minor and allowed her to hope for a lighter sentence. And so, it happened. On October 13, 1907, the Provisional Military Court in Chernihiv found Nikiforova guilty of belonging to the anarcho-communists, participating in the murder of a Starodub police officer, and robbing a priest. She was sentenced to hanging, but when the sentence was confirmed, the execution was commuted to 20 years of hard labour due to her falsified age.

A year after the trial, Nikiforova was transferred to Moscow. The accompanying documents noted: “Prone to escape. In the common cell, she is a leader and agitator. It’s a good idea to keep her in solitary. Requires especially vigilant supervision as an important criminal.”

Upon her arrival in Moscow in May 1909, Nikiforova was imprisoned in the Moscow Provincial Women’s Hard Labour Prison. She shared a cell with two other political radicals: Natalya Klimova, an SR Maximalist serving an indefinite term organizing an assassination attempt on Peter Stolypin, the Russian Minister of the Interior; and Ekaterina Nikitina, another Maximalist.

Twenty years later, Nikitina claimed in her memoirs, among other things, that Nikiforova’s “real name” was not Maria but Vladimir and that she was neither a woman nor a man but a hermaphrodite. Nikitina’s salacious story about Nikiforova’s ambiguous gender has gained popularity since the 1990s and is still being retold despite any evidence. Nikiforova’s personal file from the Moscow Women’s Prison archives states: “Distinctive features: none”; “Marital status: unmarried.” The only detail given about the state of her health is anemia. Noticeably, the doctors of the prison department did not notice any “spicy” special features.

Nikiforova spent less than two months in Moscow prison. By the time she arrived, an outside group composed of various revolutionary organizations was preparing an assault on the prison. This motley crew of jailbreakers included the young Vladimir Mayakovsky, soon to gain fame as the most important Russian futurist poet. The main goal of the conspirators was to free Nikiforova’s cellmate, Klimova, but other prisoners also had the opportunity to escape. On the evening of July 1, 1909, the warden opened the cell doors, handed over free clothes to the prisoners, and led them out into the corridor. Having descended from the second floor using knotted sheets, thirteen prisoners escaped into the street. Liberated, they broke up into small groups and, accompanied by escorts, went to safe houses.

After the escape, Nikiforova ended up in Western Europe. She lived in Paris and Brussels, belonged to anarchist groups, and maintained relations with many Russian emigrants. There are several legends about Nikiforova’s life abroad. One of them claims that Nikiforova was a student at Auguste Rodin’s School of Painting and Sculpture in Paris.

Another less plausible myth is that when the First World War broke out, Nikiforova enrolled in an officer school in Paris, from which she graduated in 1916, and then, as part of the French army, participated in battles on the Thessaloniki front in Greece before returning to Russian in 1917. Considering Nikiforova’s activities in 1917, this series of events is more than doubtful. Moreover, it is simply impossible to imagine that a combat officer would be released from active duty in the army during the World War. One way or another, upon returning to Russia, Nikiforova never declared her “officer rank” but identified photography as her profession.

...

Author: Lilia Folt
Title: On Anti-Surveillance Mindfulness
Date: September 27th, 2026
Notes: Originally published in Dissonant Times, a grassroots journalism and counter-info project from the Willamette Valley of Oregon.
Source: Dissonant Times, Retrieved on 11/5/2026 from https://dissonanttimes.org/anarchic-reflections-on-anti-surveillance-mindfulness/

Surveillance has become a ubiquitous feature of everyday life in America. Cameras watch us from businesses and homes, from bus stops, from cars, from traffic lights. Bluetooth trackers ping our smartphones as we pass by, mapping our movements. The phones themselves illuminate our paths through society by continuously pinging cell towers, providing our cell providers our location data, information that is only a subpoena away, if that. In countless ways, we’ve been made to both passively accept and actively participate in our own surveillance. This vast complex of surveillance doesn’t just gather information about us, it also shapes our behaviors, temperaments, and ways of moving through the world. Surveillance molds us down to the level of subjective, sensory, embodied experience. At that same level we can begin to shake off its hold on us and reclaim ourselves. For that, I am offering a practice I’m calling “anti-surveillance mindfulness,” a form of walking meditation that builds mindful awareness of surveillance cameras. This practice, if taken up consistently, opens onto a broader project of transforming our relationship to the places we live in, a project that itself naturally blossoms into materially transforming public space, as self expands to world in the moment-by-moment practice of mindfulness.

Anti-Surveillance Mindfulness

Readers may or may not be familiar with the Panopticon. Designed by 18th century English liberal Jeremy Bentham, the Panopticon was a model for an institutional building designed so that a single prison guard can watch all the inmates from a central watch tower. The inmates, meanwhile, cannot tell whether or not they are being watched, and therefore could be watched at any moment. To quote Bentham:

The more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been attained. (...) This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.

A lot has changed since the 1700’s, but the disciplinary paradigm of surveillance has remained the same. If anything, it has expanded beyond specific institutions to encompass much of society.

There are cameras everywhere, and we are being watched, and while we are aware of this, we tend to see it as normal and unremarkable, an inevitability we must resign ourselves to. Consciousness of being surveilled fades into the background, becoming a constant assumption of being watched that we internalize. This surveillance consciousness is running us all the more effectively because it is not distinct, because it is unconscious. That is why the first step in anti-surveillance mindfulness is becoming conscious of surveillance.

Mindfulness is at the same time a means and an end, the seed and the fruit. When we practice mindfulness in order to build up concentration, mindfulness is a seed. But mindfulness itself is the life of awareness: the presence of mindfulness means the presence of life, and therefore mindfulness is also the fruit. — Thích Nhất Hạnh, The Miracle of Mindfulness

“Mindfulness” is a practice originating in various sects of Buddhism. The mindfulness practices and concepts I’m familiar with have largely been within the school of Zen Buddhism[1].

The classic mindfulness practice is watching the breath, and that is a great starting point. Take a breath in, the air entering through your nose, your stomach and chest softly expanding as you inhale. Then exhale through the mouth, the stomach and chest settling back down, gently exhaling for a little longer than your inhale. Repeat this several times, deepening your breaths slightly. From there, start to check in with your body. Notice how it feels to be sitting down, or to be standing if you are standing; notice how it feels to be holding this piece of paper, holding your phone, or looking at your computer, however it is that you are reading this.

The practice I am calling “anti-surveillance mindfulness” is a walking meditation, or a meditation performed however it is you get around. While walking or rolling on the sidewalk, first get in touch with your breath, as above. Then, begin to notice your surroundings: the buildings, the sky, the trees, the people, the sounds. Make note of the cameras that you see while walking around, on businesses, or Ring cameras on houses, cameras too on bus stops. Tesla cars all have cameras. Look at what angles these cameras are pointed in, if you can figure out where they’re pointing—on some of the dome-shaped cameras, this isn’t clear. Notice when you are in view of these various cameras; notice when you are not in view of cameras.

With this practice, surveillance goes from being a taken-for-granted, constant background of your subjectivity, to a distinct phenomenon that you are consciously aware of. When it fades into the background, it becomes a part of you—putting it into your conscious awareness makes it once again separate from you and your being.

...

Author: K. C. Sinclair
Title: Proudhon, Slavery, and the American Civil War
Date: November 2026
Source: Retrieved on November 5, 2026 from historykeepshappening.wordpress.com

In a passing remark made by the renowned historian of anarchism, Paul Avrich, in his 1988 book, Anarchist Portraits (pg.20), we are told that the infamous French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, did not support the side of the North (otherwise known as the Union) in the American Civil War.

Avrich, uncharacteristically, provided no source for this, as if it was already common knowledge, neglecting to clarify whether Proudhon opposed both sides of the war, or perhaps worse, supported the South. He also left us hanging as to whether he’d gleaned this information from Proudhon’s own words in French, from secondary sources in English, or from both. Not much of Proudhon’s work had been translated into English at the time, but perhaps Avrich accessed the French documentation. The subject in the chapter in question was not Proudhon but instead a passionate supporter of the North, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and Proudhon was only mentioned as a point of contrast, so perhaps this is the simplest explanation for Avrich’s failure to provide a citation.

Whether Avrich knew it or not, the subject of Proudhon’s position on the war had already been addressed by the presumably non-anarchist musician and writer, Thomas A. Sancton, in his 1979 academic journal article, The Myth of French Worker Support for the North in the American Civil War. Decades later, in 2021, Sancton greatly expanded that article with his book, Sweet Land of Liberty: America in the Mind of the French Left, 1848-1871.

In the 1979 article, Sancton referenced both published works and private letters of Proudhon’s in order to show that if the French anarchist had opposed both sides of the war, for different reasons, he still more strongly opposed the North than the South. Sancton, unfortunately quoted Proudhon out of chronological order and without translation, so I have rearranged and translated those quotes for the purposes of this article.

Proudhon, in a September 1862 letter to Gustave Chaudey asked, “we have no faith in the North’s philanthropy; we do not accept that the Federal Constitution prevents secession; …. what’s more, the forces of the North are suffering one setback after another; England, Belgium, and France — consumed by poverty — call for cotton; and if the imperial [French] government, by a stroke of good luck links the two issues of Mexico and the Confederates, restoring relations between Europe and New Orleans, will you still attack it on that front?”

Proudhon refers here to the Second Franco-Mexican War. Imperialist France had invaded Mexico in early 1862, a few months after the American Civil War began.

Sancton doesn’t provide his own analysis of this particular quote beyond noting that it proves that Proudhon’s anti-Yankee sentiment was not isolated to his published works. But, for our part, we can note that Proudhon, for an anarchist, sounds oddly defensive about both the government of the American secessionists and that of his own French Empire, particularly given that the defense of slavery was very much the South’s reason for seccession.

Proudhon, in a letter to (Lucien?) Jottrand in October of 1864, wrote, “I am not, I admit, a friend of the Anglo-Saxons, and I believe that few people are fond of them. Also, I deplored the policy of our emperor, who could have, if he had wanted… obtained from the South the promise of emancipation for the blacks, and intervening then as an interested party in the present war, would have, at the time I am writing to you, brought those in the North to their senses.”

Again, Sancton does not comment on the specifics of Proudhon’s words here, only elaborating to the extent of pointing out that Proudhon had some influence on the French labour movement, even if he was not its official spokesman. We, on the other hand, can note that Proudhon’s opposition to the North is clearly stronger than his opposition to the South, and that he was strangely naive about the South’s willingness to part with slavery.

In his 1865 book, On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes, Proudhon even commented publicly on the war. Sancton uses an extended quotation from that book, the translation here being taken from the one done by Shawn P. Wilbur, while the truncations are Sancton’s.

“As I write,” Proudhon explained, “[…] the United States of the North also claims to retain in the Union, by force, the United States of the South, calling them traitors and rebels, neither more nor less than if the old Union were a monarchy and Mr. Lincoln an emperor. It is clear, however […] leaving aside the question of slavery, the war waged against the South by the North is unjust […] in which case the Americans will do well to erase from their platforms in the future the words of political liberty, republic, democracy, confederation and even Union. Already they are beginning to deny on the other side of the Atlantic the rights of States, which means the federative principle […]”

Once more, Sancton provides no commentary, but we can see that Proudhon’s naivety reached truly astonishing heights as he preposterously abstracted away from the question of slavery and even accused the North of having started the war, despite the South having both seceded and fired first, and the North not making moves to abolish slavery until the war was well underway. Incredibly, in Proudhon’s formulation, states’ rights and the abstract federative principle take precedence over the rights of enslaved people. Naturally, he does not even bother trying to explain how a people can properly exercise their right to federation while still being enslaved by others.

...

Author: anonymous
Title: Adventures in the Terrible Beauty of Resistance
Subtitle: An interview by Millennials are Killing Capitalism
Date: 29/09/2026
Source: https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/adventures-in-the-terrible-beauty-of-resistance-with-the-death-to-toll-campaign

Welcome to Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. This is Jay. In this episode we had the rare opportunity to interview a spokesperson from a direct action group that has targeted Toll Holdings, in australia. The campaign has engaged in a range of sabotage, vandalism, and disruptive actions, including sledgehammering windows, cutting internet cables, blockading roads and in an international port entrance, they have also slashed lines and cut valves to disable vehicles, covered facilities inside and out with paint and foul liquids, and sabotaged infrastructure such as signal boxes used by Toll. In this discussion we asked them about the development of the antizionist movement in australia after October 7th 2023, and asked about how their group settled on its target, prepared their campaign, and selected the tactics they wanted to use in it. As our guest raises the spirit of adventure they see as necessary to take meaningful direct action to confront the genocidal war machine, I also asked them what they think about allegations of adventurism that can be levied from the left at those who take such action. Because this campaign is heavily under threat by the State, we agreed to some additional security measures in this conversation. The voice you hear is not the actual voice of the person we interviewed; the original interview was transcribed and then converted to audio using text-to-voice generator. Just as an editorial disclaimer from me amid heightened attacks on various forms of speech, I just want to say as a platform we are not advocating that people engage in any form of illegal activity. Having said that we do understand the greatest crime that humanity has recognized, the crime of genocide, is still ongoing. There are moral, ethical, and even legal imperatives that people are engaging in order to try to stop that crime from continuing to unfold. This interview is to hear from those who are taking direct action to hold genocide and War crimes. These actions have been threatened with severe repression, and many who take these forms of action do face repression. We see it as a journalistic responsibility to ensure that people hear from those who are willing to take action to stop genocide. We know that their voices will be marginalized by most media platforms out there. It is also very important that people show up and support political prisoners if we are ever to build a movement that is capable of confronting the machinery of genocide and imperialism. We will include links to the Death to Toll campaign website, and other interviews with their spokespeople in the show description.

First of all welcome to Millennials are Killing Capitalism, it’s great that we are able to do this interview to talk about the work that you’re doing in so-called australia, or that region in the world. It’s not an area that we get to cover as often as we should, and that’s typical of us US-brained people that you know, we tend to be quite US-centric. Or maybe focusing on areas like Palestine, and Iran, and Lebanon, where we’ve seen some of the hot elements of this war in its most direct forms. But we do want to highlight different ways that people in different places are resisting the genocide of Palestinians, and this broader campaign to undermine the sovereignty of the entire West Asian region as we see it. And your campaign is one that was brought to my attention by some friends of the platform. And it’s really important that people are able to hear from you.

A: Thanks so much. Really happy to be here.

So to start, could you talk a little bit about the anti-zionist or pro-Palestine movement in so-called australia. Obviously I’m saying so-called because like the United States, Australia is another settler colony historically. Give me some of the lay of the land, what that has looked like over the last however many years you want — and share what inspired this campaign we are discussing today.

A: Yeah, so there’s obviously been activism in solidarity with Palestine for a long time in Australia, but I would say that post-Al Aqsa Flood, there was this moment of intensity where, for a minute, it felt like everything changed. And it felt like things had changed in a bad way because of the horror of the genocide and the urgency that that engendered. But I think that one thing that also changed was the sense that, like, honour and agency had been returned to colonized people, in a way. You’d be familiar with the sort of humanitarian thing of like, all these poor people, they’re suffering but the idea of colonized people fighting back. Of colonizers running for their lives. And of the possibilities of what this world can look like just being blown open, like, suddenly I felt and I think many others felt that this was something which was opened up by Al Aqsa Flood. And of course, when possibilities are opened up, you know, the possibility of resistance is opened up. And then at the same time, where you have resistance you have counter-insurgency.

...

Author: Ernesto Castro
Title: We Have Confused Thinking with Certificates of Belonging Long Enough
Subtitle: An interview with the Spanish philosopher Ernesto Castro
Source: Retrieved on 2026-11-05 from <mowmag.com/attualita/-nei-vetri-rotti-non-c-e-nessun-significato-politico-intervista-totale-a-ernesto-castro-la-star-della-filosofia-mai-tradotta-in-italia-citare-sorel-o-benjamin-non-trasforma-un-incendio-in-una-tesi-di-dottorato>
Introduction

In Spain, Ernesto Castro is something of an anomaly: an academic philosopher who fills lecture halls, who has turned his classes into one of the most-watched philosophy channels in the Spanish-speaking world, and who despite this (or perhaps because of it) remains wary of his own popularity. Born in Madrid in 1990, he teaches Aesthetics at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where for years he has been building a philosophical system of his own, which he has named “generic naturalism.” He has not yet been translated into Italian, and that gap is worth filling.

His bibliography has a range that in Italy would seem almost suspicious. There are books of ontology, such as Realismo poscontinental, in which he tries to end the old trench war between analytic and continental philosophy. There is El trap. Filosofía millennial para la crisis en España (2019), which used a musical genre despised by highbrow critics to read the forms of life, desires and contradictions of the generation that grew up inside the 2008 crisis. There are the political essays, from Ética, estética y política. Ensayos (y errores) de un metaindignado (2020) to Memorias y libelos del 15M, an unsparing reckoning with a movement Castro lived from the inside, at twenty, in the squares of the indignados. And there is a Platonic trilogy of philosophical novels, opened by Jantipa o Del morir (2022) and continued with Perictione o De la libertad (2023), an epistolary novel set in Paris in 1968.

Why talk about him now, and why in Italy? Because the squares are full again. From France to Spain, from Portugal to Belgium and all the way to Milan, a new wave of protest, driven by the cost of living, low wages and the housing crisis, has brought back onto the streets a generation that waves One Piece flags alongside red and Palestinian ones, that is rediscovering the communist vocabulary, and that at the same time lives in countries where the ballot box rewards the radical right. Castro is one of the few European thinkers who has already been through all of this: he has watched a street movement be born, become a party, enter institutions and disappoint many of its promises. He talks about it without nostalgia and without cynicism, and with a quality rare in public debate: a willingness to contradict even those who consider him one of their own.

There is also a more intimate, distinctly Italian reason. The radical thought our struggles produced, from Tronti’s operaismo to Negri’s autonomism, has been read, debated and often mythologized elsewhere. Hearing how it is judged by a Spanish philosopher trained on Manuel Sacristán, one who refuses to “inherit the obligation to always prove it right,” is a good way of looking at ourselves in the mirror. The answers that follow are an exercise in what Castro calls the training of attention, as opposed to the management of indignation: drawing distinctions where everyone else generalizes, and thinking precisely when it would be most comfortable to stop.

The Interview 1. From 15M to 2026.

You took part in the indignados movement and wrote about it in Memorias y libelos del 15M. Today protests have spread to France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Spain, driven by the cost of living, low wages and the housing crisis. Is this a return of 15M or something different? And what should these squares learn from 15M’s passage from the street to the institutions, with its promises and its disappointments?

It’s best not to turn 15M into a generic name for any discontent that takes to the streets. I took part in it at twenty, and precisely for that reason I distrust its retrospective canonization. The most valuable thing about those squares was that you could argue with someone who didn’t share your premises and leave the conversation thinking something else. When a movement turns into an identity to be defended, that possibility begins to disappear. We had come together to talk, and we ended up fighting over who got to speak on behalf of everyone.

Nor do I accept, just like that, on trust, that Podemos was 15M come of age. Assembly democracy and electoral competition follow different logics. Many demands for institutional transformation were lost along the way, while the initial plurality narrowed until it became a new division into friends and enemies. We left the two-party system without leaving binary thinking.

To today’s protests I would say: don’t confuse the success of your spokespeople with the satisfaction of your demands. That someone moves from the banner to the parliamentary seat may be wonderful for their CV. For those who still can’t pay the rent, it all remains to be proven. And I would also say: don’t turn defeat into a comfortable identity. Being right against the whole world is not the same as having changed something.

2. The aesthetics of protest.

In El trap you read millennial precarity through a musical form. Today in Paris you see One Piece flags in the marches, next to red and Palestinian ones. Has pop culture become Gen Z’s political grammar? Is it a sign of powerlessness or a new form of collective imagination?

...

Author: Lois Waisbrooker
Title: A Sex Revolution
Date: 1894
Notes: Second Edition
Source: <http://www.pierssen.com/misc/treasures/asr.htm>
Preface.

Dear Reader:—The history of the past shows us that nations rise, go through a longer or shorter period of prosperity and then decay. The ruling motive in the life of nations, so far, has always been the same, the aggressive or masculine. Self-aggrandizement, our nation right or wrong, all to be laid upon the national altar in the name of patriotism, a centralizing of wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, and the result has always been what? Go, gather together the human wrecks of any one nation and you have your answer.

Now will not this latest and brightest of nations perish also unless methods are changed, unless the social lever is reversed? Already the seeds of decay are taking root; is there not some law through which we may take a new lease of life, and what is that law, if there be such, if it be not that

“woman, take the lead?”

True, woman is already quite prominent, is becoming more so, but she does not seem as yet to realize that with man’s methods she will succeed no better than man has done. She must formulate her own methods before her true work can appear. Woman must be free, must refuse to be led, must believe in herself, before the evils attendant upon imperfect motherhood can be eliminated, and as I see things, the only hope of our nation lies in this direction.

Let us once rise above the necessity of armies, navies, prisons, almshouses, asylums, etc., then the future will stretch out before us with ever increasing brightness. The first step toward this desirable consummation is to believe that it can be done; the next is that it will be done, and lastly to determine to do it ourselves.

L. W.

Chapter I.

First, a little something about myself. I, Margaret Mulgrove, am a childless widow. My husband, Richard Mulgrove, went into the Union army at the beginning of our last war and never came out alive. My only child, little Bessie, took the scarlet fever in the second year of my widowhood, and though employing the most skillful physician in the whole country around, I could not save her. To say that I was desolate does not begin to express the feeling I had.

An aunt, my father’s only sister who lived in another State, hearing of my bereavement, decided to come and stay with me awhile and wrote me to that effect. Now my father and mother had in their lifetime (I forgot to say that I was an orphan also) had been good orthodox Christians and had brought me up to walk in the same path, so when Aunt Belinda wrote me she was coming I was a little troubled, for I had been told that she was an Infidel.

I believed infidelity to be something awful, and as our community was a very respectable one, to have a woman of that character come among us, and as my relative was an affliction I had not counted on, but it could not be helped; aunt would be there the next day and I must make the best of it. So the next morning I went to work to put things in the best order possible to receive my expected relative.

She came about ten o’clock, a pleasant faced, white haired lady toward whom my heart instinctively went out, and in spite of my prejudices I felt that I should love her. She stayed with me several months during which time nothing was said or done which brought up the subject of beliefs. True, I had purposely avoided everything that could lead in that direction, but she did not seem at all inclined to be aggressive.

The Sunday, and in fact the day before she left, our minister’s sermon called out some remarks from her that surprised me very much.

“Why aunt,” I exclaimed, “I thought you were an Infidel!”

“And so I am to church theology.”

“And yet you have just affirmed your belief in the underlying principle of all church theology.”

“How is that?” she asked.

“You said you believe in God manifest in the flesh.”

“I said I believed God manifest in the flesh was necessary to the salvation of the race, but I did not say I believed it had already taken place.”

“Not taken place! do you then look for a coming Christ?”

The old lady smiled. “Before you can understand me,” she said, “you must learn that a narrow personal application of a general principle is, must be false. The universal spirit of life can never be manifest in its fullness through, or be embodied in a person, in any one man or woman. When God is manifest in the flesh as I mean, it will be through the race. Man, as a race will have become God-like, will have arisen above his present condition, will be saved, not from future, but from present hells.”

“Well, I really cannot understand you, aunt.”

“I mean simply this, my child, when enough of the love, power and wisdom immanent in the deific fountain becomes developed in the race, and in harmonious proportions, then the evils which now afflict humanity will disappear.”

“But how is this to be done?” I asked.

“By belief in our own power to accomplish, through the God within ourselves, that which the church expects, waits for a God outside of ourselves to do for us. God, the soul or spirit of the universe must be manifest in, and act through us to the overcoming of all difficulties, to the surmounting of every obstacle that lies in the way of the progress of the race.”

...

Author: Various Authors
Title: Hip Culture
Subtitle: 6 Essays on Its Revolutionary Potential; Yippie, Third World, Feminist, Marxist, High School Student, Anarchist
Date: 1970
Source: <https://archive.org/details/HipCulture>
Synopsis

Counter-Culture or Counter-Revolution

Is the ideology of Hip Culture the essence of self-determination, of the universal right of the individual to control her/his everyday life; the harbinger of the end of domination, authoritarianism, hierarchy and power? Is Hip Culture making demands that cannot be accommodated by the system and will thus bring about the end of the capitalist era?

OR

Is “do your own thing” the slogan of hip middle-class, white men who continue to do their thing, as their straight counterparts have always done, by dominating and exploiting women, the Third World and working people? Will today’s energy of discontent merely be channeled into the making of a groovy drug/rock sanctuary for the disenchanted inheritors of capitalism’s overabundance?

 

Stanzas of .... And I Danced in the Mud and the Blood and the Beer, a poem by Jon Grell, are interspaced throughout the essays.

1

well, it’s two days after i split from woodstock and the mud is still caked heavy on my boots and my pants below my knees are still shit brown, four days of constant tripping has still left an acid reality in my head and, yeah, goddamnit, i wish i was still the fuck up there instead of coughing my lungs out from too much carbon monoxide here in good old new york city.

Right On, Culture Freeks!

George Metefsky[1]

Why Cultural Revolution?

To believe that revolution is possible in this country without destroying the psychological stranglehold of middle class culture upon the workers, as if revolution could be made by the 3rd World poor alone, is a delusion. The vast majority of Americans are indeed working class; but the whole thrust of their culture, which is capitalist, has been to repress that class identity. They think of themselves as white, American, taxpayer, home-owners—not as workers. To bring about real revolution, it has always been necessary to raise the consciousness of the greater mass of the people to the point where they see the need for the revolution and identify with it. This means that the worker’s middle class identity, and culture supporting that identity, must be seriously weakened before they can identify with the revolution.

To avoid this hard fact, many leftists are fond of arguing from the revolutionary experiences of Russia, China, or Cuba, that a capitalist ‘crisis’ will sooner or later reduce the middle class worker to poverty, forcing him into revolutionary consciousness. They ignore the concrete lesson of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, when workers’ struggles were contained by the middle class “liberalism” (and the CP. Popular Front), and channeled into purely economic reforms within the system. The people of Russia, China, or Cuba shared not only common poverty, but a common consciousness and folk culture that was quite distinct from the bourgeoisie. It was but a short step to class or national consciousness of common discontent of the fact that they had nothing to lose through revolution.

For a useful parallel to the U.S., we must go to the abortive revolution in France, May ’68. Only with France do we find the same middle class majority, and the same economic grievances: constant, irritating inflation. France showed that it will not be bureaucratic unions which are the vanguard of the revolution in the imperialist mother country, but students and young workers who are not yet totally sucked into the hyperworker/superconsumer role, who find a rebellious (if commercialized) identity in their “youth culture.” Even if the most advanced workers join the revolution out of plain economic dissatisfaction, reactionary union bureaucrats will oppose them, while the majority of the middle class continues to support reaction.

Imperialism supports a huge middle class within the mother country. There is far less revolutionary working class tradition in this country than in France, and workers are trained to shy away from it. To awaken them, middle class culture itself must be smashed.

Middle class culture is vulnerable. While people identify themselves as “middle class,” they have merely exchanged working class discontent for a more diffuse middle class dissatisfaction, not just with the war, rising prices, and frozen wages, but with the whole game of accumulating plastic and hating people. Their dissatisfaction breaks through the officially approved consciousness in a million ways. For instance, the middle class with its taste for folk music, and the lower middle class with their country and western, seek to identify with a real, soulful folk culture which middle class life excludes, in which they can be free participants rather than passive consumers. No one can identify with a Hollywood orchestra the way you identify with Johnny Cash. The system never really succeeds in repressing people’s common humanity—the ‘3rd world within’—and this conflict finally reduces the middle class to passivity and cynicism, driving them to the extremes of local reaction, or rebellion. Come a healthy people’s culture, and middleclass culture tends to collapse like a sick balloon.

...

Author: thanatokephaloides
Title: A Samhain Memorial
Subtitle: Anti-Capitalist Meetup: Samhain 2015 Anarchist/Socialist Open Memorial Thread
Date: November 1, 2015
Source: Retrieved on Oct 29 2026 from https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/1/1443162/community/Anti-Capitalist-Meetup-Samhain-2015-Anarchist-Socialist-Open-Memorial-Thread/

SAMHAIN. Pronounced “sow-ween” or “sow-ain”, the term is the old Gaelic name for this time of year. Today it is better known as Hallowe’en, All Hallows Day, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, and covers the time between October 31 to November 2 inclusive.

It is a lot more than going from door to door begging for candy, although this enjoyable modern ritual also has its place, binding us to our ancestors’ other children (especially those who still are children!).

But it goes much further than that.

This week, I thought I would simply open a Samhain Open Memorial Thread amongst the Anti-Capitalist Meetup community. On this day, when the ancient, pre-Christian Lore of the Celtic peoples of Western Europe teaches that the Veil between the living and our dead Ancestors is thinnest, it is appropriate to bring those Ancestors to remembrance by name that our memories of them and our debts to them may live on. Let us remember them, love them, revere them, and give them our gratitude in Solidarity for what their lives have given us.

I thank ZhenRen for his contributions to our Diary of two weeks ago, which I have taken the liberty of adapting to this week’s Diary by making a very small set of textual changes to expand the poetry to cover all of our Ancestors instead of just one.

With that, let us begin……..

From this Comment by ZhenRen, I open our Memorial this evening:

Come, you ancestors!
Brothers, sisters, comrades, come!
Come you all, for the Veil is thinnest
On this very night of nights!
Come ye, that we may love you again
That we may bond with you again
That we may share Solidarity with you again
For:
“Our heart is with you!
Our anger is fuelled by your strength.
We are all here.
We are all here.
It’s just your bodies which will stay where they are.
You will be with us forever.
You will be our light and illumination forever.”

— words after “For:” adapted from Emel’s eulogy of Ali Kitapci

I offer the text from Istanbul Indymedia in Ali Kitapci’s memory as a lesson tonight:

For Ali Kitapci..

It’s raining. On all our memories with Ali…
It’s raining. Yet yesterday the killers have washed away the blood on the street long ago.
It’s raining.
All those drinks we had together, all those actions we went, all those slogans we shouted, all that gas we breathed. Ali’s asthma crisis..
It’s raining.
State attacks.
It’s raining so badly.
All the comrades, we are together just like we did 20 years ago.
We are together, just like it happened in 1936!
Ali had given his life to the class struggle, to the trade-union movement.
He was one of those unnamed “heroes” struggling to transform the anarchist movement from a weak breath into a lively alternative of freedom.
Let his memory be our comrade…
We won’t forget, we won’t forgive!

To this I add: We are all together, just like it happened in 1936….. and 1886…. and 1917…. 1914….. 1940…. and many, many other times!

On this night, all of our comrades are together; we living reaching out to you who live no more as we live; but yet you live on, so long as we do not forget……

I call to remember our Anarchist Ancestors, the Heroes of Haymarket 1886, the ones who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our holy Cause as well as those who, like us, lived for that selfsame Cause afterwards. Comrades, sisters, and brothers, please suffer me to name them:

August Spies
Albert R. Parsons
George Engel
and Adolph Fischer

spilled their life’s blood at the murderous hands of the State of Illinois; whereas

Samuel Fielden
Michael Schwab
and Oscar Neebe
suffered imprisonment, privation, and other bitter sacrifices for the same sacred Cause we hold so dear!

To these, please allow me to add:

Emma Goldman
Paul Proudhon
Mikhail Bakunin
Alexander Berkman

and, of course, Ali Kitapci himself, whose life and actions in Anatolia, ending with his untimely and unfortunate death, inspired what amounts to a far better Anarcho-Socialist Samhain Memorial than I could hope to write by myself alone!

Let me add to these some names that might sound just a little strange here: Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Yes, these men were typical bourgeois richies of their day; yet certain ideas they proposed had reach far beyond their grasp or even their understanding. I refer to the individual-held freedoms of religion, speech, and press, without which it would still be a crime in all English-speaking nations to even mention the word “Samhain”, much less celebrate it as we are doing now! (The subjects of the UK’s Monarch only fully received this freedom in 1951 source, and South Africans still don’t have it source!)

To these, I offer a more personal memorial: to my maternal grandfather James E. Riley, who taught me far more things than I could hope to relate with my expected remaining lifetime; but relevant to our Memorial and our Cause, he taught me that Socialism was not the fearsome bugaboo that most sources in my native Colorado Springs, Colorado wanted me to think it was, but rather, truly, the sole alternative to total and complete barbarism!

...

Author: Nikos Maziotis
Title: The reckoning of a city guerrilla
Date: 28/10/2026
Source: <athens.indymedia.org/post/1643006/>
 

October 2026

After 14 years in prison for my involvement in Revolutionary Struggle, I have reached the end of a long and harsh ordeal.

Being a revolutionary is demonstrated by the cost of the choices one is willing to pay and by defending the choices of struggle for which one found oneself in prison.In our case, a long-term imprisonment or death in a confrontation with the servants of the state and the bosses, as happened to comrade Lambros Foundas on March 10, 2010, is the price of our choices –something I knew from the very beginning.

In struggle, as in life in general, nothing comes without a price. Because whatever is worthwhile is difficult and requires sacrifices. However, the cost of the choices applies to everyone without exception, even the enemy, as well as to the servants of the state who were wounded by the weapons of Revolutionary Struggle: in Exarchia in 2009 after the murder of Grigoropoulos; during the expropriation of Piraeus Bank in Kleitoria in 2014; and in Monastiraki, also in 2014, when they nearly killed me.

For several years, the structures and mechanisms of the state and capital experienced the power of Revolutionary Struggle’s bombs, including the ECB branch, the Bank of Greece and the IMF office, the Athens Stock Exchange, the Ministries of Employment and Economy, the Evelpidon courts, police stations such as those in Kallithea and Perissos, and banks such as Citibank and Eurobank. Of course, the United States will never forget the anti-tank rocket attack on its embassy in Athens in 2007. Meanwhile, the former Minister of Public Order, Voulgarakis, realized that no government official, regardless of how senior they may be, is invulnerable.

Revolutionary Struggle is part of a historical tradition within the revolutionary and anarchist movement dating back to the era of the First International of Workers, which employed armed struggle and guerrilla warfare, as did the organization Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) in Russia, or as did the anarchists with what they called “propaganda by the deed” when they carried out bomb attacks and assassinations of kings, heads of state, and prime ministers. It is part of a historical tradition whose constituent elements included the armed resistance against Franco, the guerrilla struggle against the Axis forces in occupied Europe, and urban guerrilla warfare in recent decades.

Revolutionary Struggle is part of a historical tradition based on the struggles of peoples for social liberation from the yoke of the state and capital, for self-organization against the centralized state, whatever form it may take. A tradition based, among other things, on the Paris Commune of 1871, the anti-state tendency of the Russian Revolution –including the Kronstadt Commune of 1921 and the Makhnovshchina (1918–21) in Ukraine, which fought against the tsarist White counterrevolutionaries, the nationalists, and the rising Bolshevik totalitarianism– the Mexican Revolution, and the Spanish Revolution (1936–39), which was murdered both by the Stalinist counterrevolutionaries and the Francoist fascists.

Throughout my life of struggle, I have spent 18 years in prison for my choices, which I honored and defended publicly in society and before the enemy. Of those 18 years, 14 were for the actions of Revolutionary Struggle. However paradoxical it may seem to some, freedom fighters passionately love life, sometimes risking being killed, while they love freedom, risking ending up in prison.

The founding of Revolutionary Struggle in 2003 and my participation in it were the result of a militant and political maturation. From this ordeal, as comrade Roupa did as well, I emerge victorious, with my head held high. Because we defended our political identity as members of Revolutionary Struggle. Because we defended our actions and every attack carried out by Revolutionary Struggle, one by one, as well as all 18 operations from 2003 to 2017, in all the trials against the organization. Because we defended our comrade Lambros Foundas, a member of the organization who was killed in a clash with police officers. Because if we had renounced our political identity in the hope of saving ourselves from repression, if we had not assumed political responsibility, that would have been the highest form of alienation; we would have betrayed our dead comrade Lambros Foundas, who was killed during a preparatory action by Revolutionary Struggle against the First Memorandum, and who gave his life so that the crisis could become an opportunity for the Social Revolution.

We emerge as political victors because we remained unrepentant, because we did not renounce our choices. If in earlier periods in Greece –such as, for example, during the Metaxas dictatorship, the civil war, and the 1967–’74 dictatorship– the issue at stake in repudiation and repentance was communism, in our time the issue at stake is renouncing one’s status as a member of the guerrilla organization and, by extension, in practice, renouncing the guerrilla struggle and the revolution.

...

Author: Nick Heath
Title: Spanish anarchists in the Welsh valleys
Date: January 25 2011
Notes: A short account of the Spanish miners in South Wales and their relationship — sometimes positive, sometimes strained — with the local mining population.
Source: Retrieved on Nov 1 2026 from https://libcom.org/article/spanish-anarchists-welsh-valleys

Just as the Franco-Italian anarchist miner Lawrence Storione imported revolutionary ideas to the Fife area of Scotland, so too did Spanish anarchist and socialist miners and steelworkers to South Wales in similarly little known circumstances.

The Orconero Iron Ore Company in northern Spain had been a subsidy of the Dowlais Iron Company in South Wales since 1873. In 1900 several hundred Spanish workers and their families were brought to Dowlais from northern Spain in what was seen as a way of undercutting wages for Welsh workers. A street was specifically built for them in Dowlais- King Alphonso Street after the then Spanish monarch Alfonso XII and two areas of the town were given over to them. However if the idea was to undercut the Welsh workers, it was a bad plan as most of those who came to South Wales were socialist or anarchist workers who had themselves been victimised for activity in Spain. They joined the local unions straight away. Shortly after, several Spanish families moved to the anthracite mining village of Abercrave in the Swansea Valle to work for a French mining company that had opened up the International Colliery there.

“Abercrave, a quiet little mining village of only a few thousand inhabitants at the top of the Swansea Valley, has now become one of the most cosmopolitan in the district. In addition to the Welsh, English, Scotch and Irish residing in the locality, there has been a strong influx during the past few years of Frenchman, Spaniards, Portuguese, Germans, Belgians &c, and employment has been found for them in the local collieries. The Spaniards form the strongest colony, and it is computed that there are over 200 in all” ( quoted in O’Leary). In Abercrave the Spanish settled on Davies Street and Brooklands Terrace, a line of single story two-room cottages. The area became known as Spanish Row or Espaniardos Row.

Among those who came to Wales was the anarchist Melchor Esteban. He had been a steel worker in Bilbao. Anarchist and atheist, he obtained work at the Dowlais Ironworks in 1907 and shortly after moved to the International Colliery at Abercrave. He had brought his family with him including his son Gregorio, born in 1887, who was to later to volunteer for the International Brigades during the Civil War.

The anarchist paper Freedom first mentioned the Spanish communities in Wales in June 1901, as the result of a visit to Dowlais by the Spanish anarchist Tarrida del Marmol and the London Welsh anarchist Sam Mainwaring (they were collaborating on an anarchist paper The General Strike). Mainwaring had conducted the first socialist tour of South Wales in alongside fellow Socialist Leaguer Frank Kitz in 1887 and had set up the South Wales Socialist Society in Landore in 1892. Through the use of Spanish by del Marmol and of Welsh and English by Mainwaring, they were able to sooth tensions between the different communities. Tensions once more came to the boil in 1913, when feelings emerged among Welsh miners that ”trade unionists of good character” had been thrown out of work in favour of “strangers”. Within a month the number of Spanish workers was commented on, though with the proviso that most conducted themselves in an exemplary manner and had good relations with native workers. Some of the Spanish, including the children, spoke Welsh and English fluently, and there were numbers of young Spanish workers who prided themselves on raising their cultural level through self-education. Both Melchor Esteban and another anarchist Victoriano Lafuente were active on local lodge committees of the South Wales Miners Federation. None of the Spanish were even known to be behind with their SWMF dues (apparently many of the Spanish boys were good at rugby, some graduating to premier clubs where they had distinguished careers).

Less than a month later there was a meeting of workers from the Abercrave, International and Gwaunyclalwdd collieries, which considered whether it was advisable to employ Spanish, French and German workers. Committees were formed with the aim of approaching management to make sure that no more foreigners would be employed at the three collieries.

In this situation the anarchist Guy Aldred made an appeal to the Welsh miners: “You are workers. So are your foreign comrades of the pick and shovel…Your choice is between revolution and increasing slavery. But you will not ensure your emancipation by fighting your fellow-slaves. It is the system, the principle of profit, the aggression of Mammon which you have to war against . Not your fellow workers”. Wil Jon Edwards, a local socialist who shared many of Aldred’s views voiced a similar position in the local press but was careful not to mention revolution.

The troubled situation continued into the next year with accusations that the buildings the Spanish, French and Italians occupied were over-crowded, that they lived in ‘disgusting conditions’. An anti-foreigner demonstration was organised and plans for a strike that was narrowly averted. There was an incident between a Spanish workers and locals. But all the Spanish workers were in the South Wales Miners Federation and they strenuously denied the charges against them.

...

Author: Llinos Anwyl
Title: Learning Welsh Is What Solidarity Sounds Like
Subtitle: Language revival is class struggle — why the left in Wales can’t stay monolingual.
Date: November 3 2025
Source: Retrieved on Nov 1 2026 from https://llinos.substack.com/p/learning-welsh-is-what-solidarity

Everyone in the movement means well, but good intentions don’t make a bilingual revolution.

At the start of almost every radical meeting I’ve attended in Wales, someone says:

“Welcomecroeso.”

Then the rest of the discussion unfolds entirely in English. The word sits on the top of each agenda like a decoration — a gesture toward belonging that never quite lands.

Most of us already support the language in principle. We sign petitions, design bilingual posters for English-only events, and attend Welsh gigs… but principle is easy, participation is harder.

Across Wales, the new left speaks the vocabulary of decentralisation but rarely practises it. English remains the medium of minutes, funding bids, and strategy documents. The political project of localisation is conducted in the language of centralisation. That isn’t accidental. It’s structural.

For two centuries, capital has concentrated ownership of communication just as it concentrated ownership of land and labour. English became the infrastructure of that concentration: the language of contracts, management, and scale. When industrialisation pulled labour into English-speaking centres, Welsh declined not because people stopped caring but because production moved. As the coalfields and docks expanded, labour migration and recruitment reorganised the Welsh economy around English as the lingua franca of hierarchy.

When English became the language of wages and advancement, Welsh lost its economic footing. As capitalism evolved from industry to services, from production to speculation, the flow of capital moved further from the communities that spoke it. Today, value is extracted through ownership rather than labour: property replaces production, tourism replaces work, and heritage replaces life. The extraction continues, only the mechanism has changed. When profit depends on selling the idea of place rather than sustaining the people in it, language becomes branding.

What’s left is a culture detached from its conditions of survival.

To treat Welsh as culture rather than infrastructure is to misunderstand the nature of its decline. As Gareth Miles argued, the future of the language can’t be separated from the system that organises work, housing, and ownership. Welsh doesn’t disappear because people stop valuing it; it disappears when the means to live through it are taken away. In Marxist terms, culture sits on top of a material base, and when that base is hollowed out by capital, the language built upon it collapses too. Capitalism doesn’t just commodify land and labour, it commodifies speech, rewarding the languages of markets and administration while devaluing those of community. A language survives only when its speakers can afford to stay put, when there are jobs and affordable homes. Without those conditions, “language rights” become decorative: folk songs that no longer belong to the people who sang them.

Devolution gave Wales political institutions without economic sovereignty. The Senedd controls language policy, education, and culture, the symbolic layers of autonomy, while fiscal and industrial power remain elsewhere by design, not accident.

Cymraeg 2050, the government’s target for a million speakers reflects that contradiction. It measures success mainly in numbers and campaigns, not in whether people can actually live and work through the language.

As Colin H. Williams notes in Wake Me Up in 2050, the state can provide frameworks for language planning, but alone, they aren’t enough; real revival happens where policy meets community.

Yet even the frameworks are shaped by the logic of managerialism — language as Key Performance Indicator.

Public-sector bilingualism has advanced, but market forces still decide who can afford to live in Welsh-speaking areas. The result is an NGO-ised revival: consultants, awareness campaigns, and a linguistic economy dependent on grants rather than production.

Real language planning would mean economic planning; community-owned housing, decentralised media, universal basic income, translation as public infrastructure.

I’ve had several conversations with people who say that Welsh feels exclusionary. What they’re describing is the moment when power stops being automatic. For those used to living inside the linguistic majority, equality can feel like loss — just as workplace democracy feels slower than management, or community ownership feels messier than the market. It’s not exclusion; it’s redistribution.

To see why that feeling runs so deep, it helps to remember how the imbalance was built.

In Wales, English has long been the language of administration, education, and progress. Welsh became the language of the home, the chapel, and the playground; intimate, local, and undervalued. When those spheres were eroded by industrial collapse and social atomisation, the language was left without its base. It’s important to note that the decline of Welsh wasn’t caused by resentment or rejection, but by the slow dismantling of the social and economic structures that once sustained it — families dispersed for work, industries closed, and communities that spoke together were broken apart by the forces of history rather than hostility.

...

Author: Jim Colton
Title: The Welsh Anarchists
Date: Published in November 1971, in Black Flag, Vol. 2, No. 8.
Source: Retrieved on Nov 1 2026 from https://thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/8426.pdf

Impossible to say when the idea of Anarchism first came into Wales. It was certainly in the 19th century because in the 1890s the London group was explaining that though it had such a cosmopolitan membership it could deal with correspondence in every European language and many Asiatic ones, “Welsh unfortunately is not one of them, and we have had to ask our comrades to write in English,” (according to the late George Cores’ letters).

Around the turn of the century there were numerous Anarchist groups. The most prominent speaker was a miner named Sam Mainwaring, who was one of the most active advocates of what became the “Triple Alliance” unionism and introduced Syndicalism.

Mainwaring, who came from Neath, Glam. – near Swansea – was known throughout Wales as the pioneer of revolutionary syndicalism, even more than Tom Mann. He wrote many pamphlets, all in Welsh, none of which appear to be extant.

He it was (according to Matt Kavanagh) who first used the term “anarcho-syndicalism” to explain his difference with Tom Mann, Guy Bowman and others. This did not prevent them working together, as all were undoubtedly revolutionary syndicalists.

His nephew, also Sam, carried on the Anarchist movement amongst the Welsh miners, almost alone towards the finish, until his death in about 1942. Time and again during the Spanish War he raised at the miners’ conference the fact that the OP leadership of the NUM was discriminating against the CNT miners in Spain.

Another active Anarchist miner in the ‘20s was James Colton, whose militancy and record has been overshadowed by the fact that he married Emma Goldman.

(On a tour of the mining areas, extremely unpopular because of her stand on Russia, she was facing both constant threat of deportation and the impossibility of leaving England: at that time it was easy for a woman, by marriage, to acquire British nationality).

She was the first to admit that his record in the movement outstripped hers. In the days of the syndicalist movement he had been a popular orator, speaking to thousands of miners with fervent oratory and applause.

Because he opposed the Russian dictatorship, he was all but thrown out of the union and his job; faced abuse and ostracism and doggedly kept on speaking.

These are only three of the “old brigade”. The young Welsh comrades should take pride in following their tradition.