A few months ago, I came across a funny anecdote in this article summarising police surveillance against Black Anarchist jailhouse lawyer and radical educator, Martin Sostre & his partner and comrade Geraldine Robinson. It described a peculiar scene during a three day riot in Buffalo, New York against police brutality starting on the 27th of […]
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (andhence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless seriesof hobgoblins, all of them H. L. Mencken As a general rule, democratic theory tends to represent actors within representative democracies as essentially rational beings who, despite a tendency to […]
On seeing a public execution by Guillotine in Paris during 1857, Tolstoy remembers “the cold, inhuman efficiency of the operation.” More horrific than any scenes of war, Tolstoy sees the guillotine as a “frightful symbol of the state that used it”. Tolstoy, like Berkman comes to realise, knows it is not cruelty that we should be using, but care. Violence isn’t the job of the People it is the dirty work of the State.
After the recent death of beloved anarchist science-fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, a lot of opinion pieces appeared throughout the anarcho web assessing her legacy, with special focus given to her most overtly anarchist work: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. The novel explores, through the eyes of its scientist protagonist Shevek, the ins and […]
Transphobia is a class issue. By this I mean that in a class society that is also deeply transphobic, it is impossible to talk about transphobia in a meaningful way without also talking about class. Trans people are more likely, all other things being equal, than our cis peers to fall into the most exploited and oppressed sections of the working class and the extent to which transphobia will negatively affect any given trans person’s life will be mediated by their economic class.