RAG is a diverse group of anarcha-feminist women in Dublin. They produce a magazine, The Rag, organise film screenings and fundraisers, host public discussions, conduct workshops and zine distro. A conversation between Clare Butler and Angela Coraccio of the Revolutionary Anarcha- Feminist Group (RAG) and Leticia Ortega of RAG and the Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM)
We are pleased to announce a new addition to the works by Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) that we make available through our website. This time it is a videotape, one that was recorded in 1989 by famed filmmaker Chris Marker for Marker's own television series L'héritage de la chouette ("The Owl's Legacy").
Yesterday, a media outlet contacted us to be on a show about how Occupy had “fizzled coming into this year’s May 1.” The media keeps looking for encampments or last year’s protests and is missing how popular resistance is growing and demonstrating all over the country.
Most days the bike ride home from work fills me with joy. I am at ease on the open streets, appreciating life around me, thankful for the city roadblocks that limit car access and encourage communication with other passersby.
The transfer pressure in area C and the 1948 borders Negev intensify. The colonialist settlers increase their terror backed by the Israeli state forces. The increased popular struggle intensify too and the rightists call for harsher repression are lauder. Not all involved with the grass root popular struggles are happy with the joint struggle with Israelis, preferring to do without the relative immunity from harsher repression we provide, and without our contribution for world public opinion. The ferment in the region already decided that thing will not be the same but only popular struggle and international pressure will channel the changes to the better.
Among the noteworthy musicians active in New Orleans in the early 1900s, Antonio Maggio remains a dim historical figure, remembered only for a single pioneering composition, “I Got the Blues,” published in 1908. David Lee Joyner identifies Maggio’s work as an “early example of twelve-bar blues in ragtime” that foreshadows W. C. Handy’s famous “St. Louis Blues.” Peter Muir calls it a “milestone in blues history,” as it is the “first known instance in print of the [twelve-bar blues] sequence being associated with the notion of having the blues.”
Political parties will continue to out preform anarchist and red organizations if they continue to be organized so loosely and inefficiently. Many in our ranks hate the Church but, to look at what churches accomplish all the time and how they are able to organize such thriving communities. They are able to provide capital to function.
In the summer of 2011, when David Graeber heard rumors of a mobilization against Wall Street, he was hopeful but wary. Graeber is an anthropologist by trade, and a radical by inclination, which means that he spends a lot of time at political demonstrations, scrutinizing other demonstrators. When he wandered down to Bowling Green, in the financial district, on August 2nd, he noticed a few people who appeared to be the leaders, equipped with signs and megaphones
MAY DAY – May 1st – has been celebrated as International Worker’s Day since 1890. The date was chosen by members of the Second International to commemorate the Haymarket Affair which occurred in Chicago, United States in 1886: On May 1st 1886 American unions held a nationwide general strike. An estimated 400,000 workers went on strike in Chicago.
Forty years to the day she and her comrades were targeted by New Jersey State Troopers, Assata Shakur was again targeted when the FBI added her to its Most Wanted Terrorist List.
“In addition,” explains Democracy Now, “the state of New Jersey announced it was adding $1 million to the FBI’s $1 million reward for her capture.”
Under the cooperative model, workers own the business, reducing injustice because they have a stake in the community and because an individual will find it hard to exploit oneself. Workers often buy into their jobs (upfront or amortized), vote on major decisions in general assemblies or committees, and even voluntarily donate to the co-op for re-investment. Known as “workplace democracy,” this model of authentic self-determination renders state action superfluous.
As a freelance broadcast technician, some days I have to get up at 3AM to run camera, lights, and sound for corporate news shows like Good Morning America, The Early Show, and Meet the Press. The combination of sleep deprivation and old white guys yakking routinely tests my ability to stay awake and attentive. In order to pass the time, I sometimes try to focus less on the news, and more on the construction of the news and its discourses, lending equal attention to form and content. The producers know that people will be watching through pre-coffee morning haze --these shows are called "Breakfast Television," after all.
In 1830 after destroying a threshing machine at Barham in Kent, the Elham gang shouted out to farmer Sankey to “get up and bring us some Beer for we have been to work damn hard” (p. 175). At Stockbridge, protestors demanded four sovereigns from a Reverend Cutlet as “remuneration for their day’s work”. These actions capture both the ‘audacity’ and claims to legitimacy of those known as Captain Swing, the popular, myth-inspiring name used by bands of agricultural labourers who roamed the English countryside in the 1830s smashing threshing machines and firing ricks of hay. By asserting that “forms of protesting were also ‘work’”, as Carl Griffin notes here, “Swing groups could claim moral legitimacy in their actions”.
Mother’s Day began not just as a day to honor mothers, but as a day for mothers to express solidarity with one another and against the wars that left widows and orphans impoverished. This Mother’s Day, in honor of this tradition, we are calling for a global day of solidarity with incarcerated mothers and against a penal system that disproportionately cages people based on race, class, and gender non-conformity. Please circulate this call far and wide and help organize a noise demo outside a prison or jail near you that holds women captive. Here is a flyer that was made for one mother's day demo that you can pass out at yours.
This is a write-up of a talk I gave at Housemans bookshop for An Anarchist FAQ volume 2 publication event. It is based on my notes and is what I intended to cover. So it may not be exactly what was said on the night. And as one member of the audience rightly noted, it is very much focused around white, male Europeans. This is simply because there is still much work needed to get the ideas and histories of non-European countries into English (sadly, this also applies to much of European anarchism as well!). Still, we need to correctly understand anarchist history in order to develop it to meet the challenges of today. Hopefully this talk contributes to both processes, correctly understanding the history of anarchism and building anarchism today as a theory and movement. Whether I succeeded or not rests with the reader!
A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man argued that the human species had succeeded because of traits like sharing and compassion.
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