Libertarian Communism

Vietnamese historian Hue-Tam Ho Tai notes that only recently has the role of anarchism in the Vietnamese Revolution attracted scholarly analysis, “despite anarchism’s unmistakable influence on the revolution’s early phase." This sketch hopes to bridge that gap by pointing researchers towards key players in the early Vietnamese anarchist movement. It is drawn from excerpts from my forthcoming book In the Shadow of a Hurricane: Global Anarchist Ideological and Organisational Lineages.

F*ck May 68, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Radical Past from 1968 to Today

Session 1: History is a Weapon

June 8, 2018

Department of History, University of Liverpool

https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/circumnavigating-the-past-foreclosing-the-future-commemoration-of-the-radical-past-in-the-amnesiac-present/

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

This index of my major forthcoming work In the Shadow of a Hurricane presented below (updated September 2023 to include South Asia and Palestine, and again in June 2024 to include East Timor and Andorra) and detailing all the anarchist and similar organisations discussed in my half-million-word text should alone lay forever to rest the false notions that "anarchists don't organise" or that it is purely a European and North American phenomenon.

In the forced complicity of this game of viewing and representation, it seems we are indeed simply a device, an undepicted eye, endowed with the capacity to break the self-referential solipsism of the spectacle, that is to say, the painting and what it implies. We become a presence, brought into being by the act of being looked upon, and in this phantasmagoric capacity we also stand outside the process, code-breakers.

ook-review of Ernesto Screpanti’s Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom. In this book, Ernesto Screpanti questions the nature and status of freedom within both Marx’s thought and possible forms of communist organisation. By way of an argument which contends that communism should be understood as a theory of freedom, he extracts a deliberately individualistic version of communism from Marx’s work, and proceeds to develop this into a series of recommendations for practical-organisational forms. These forms, and the notion of freedom that they arise from, are, however, closely related to Screpanti’s adoption of an economic approach that consists of the quantification of freedom. This prompts a number of political and theoretical problems.

This is a table of anarchist and syndicalist movement initiation and duration by country, indicated by three-digit ISO country codes, and colour-coded by continent (the paler colours represent periods of repression or enforced clandestine activity). What the table makes apparent at a glance is the early emergence of anarchism in just about every region of the world by the end of the 1870s, within a decade of its founding, the near-global ubiquity of the movement into the 1920s, the devastation visited upon it by fascism and communism over the 1930s-1980s and its remarkable worldwide recovery from the 1990s. My unique periodisation of the movement, based roughly on quarter-century cycles representing the rise and fall of the fortunes of the proletariat, detailed in Cartographie de l'anarchisme révolutionnaire (Éditions Lux, Montreal, Canada, 2012) has now been updated for a new English-language edition, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism (forthcoming).

This text was written as a preface for the new edition of “Pour un municipalisme libertaire,” the French translation of “Theses on Libertarian Municipalism,” published by the Atelier de Création Libertaire in Lyon, and also appears on my Changing Suns Press and PM Press blogs.

Notes for Panel 16: Great Refusals: Refusing One Dimensionality Today

The Dialectics of Liberation in an Age of Neoliberal Capitalism
International Herbert Marcuse Society

Seventh Biennial Conference, 26-28 October 2017, York University

https://marcuseconference.wordpress.com/

This paper draws from systems theory in considering the concepts of self-organisation and emergence as potential guiding principles in the construction of an authentically communist global social collective. It challenges utopianism (including its anarchist manifestation) as sacrificing the present for a notional future, and failing to acknowledge the vital role of contingency and flexibility in social organisation. We also discuss how the Internet shares some of these positive features, and how by implication it could support a communist 'economy' of fulfilling need rather than realising profit.

Garland, C. (2014) ‘As Barriers Fall, Contingency Becomes Possibility: Protest Resisting and Escaping Containment and Categorization’, Part II Identity, Embodiment and Categorisation in Eds. Lamond, I. and Spracklen, K. 'Protests as Events: Politics, Activism and Leisure (London: Rowman & Littlefield International) Hardback ISBN/9781783480760 Paperback ISBN/978-1-78348-077-7 eBook ISBN/978-1-78348-078-4 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781783480760

It is a banality that we need to work in order to produce for our basic needs. But what is the nature of that work, for whom, and to what end? Useful work? Or useless toil? Recent UK welfare reform proposals maintain that work is the best route out of poverty, yet ignore the fact that the wage-labour relation has become a source of built-in insecurity and social instability. Wage-labour is the central pillar of capitalist relations, and the drive to productivity and valorisation of work is to be expected from the point of view of capital. However, how have social-democratic institutions, nominally of the Left, come to be complicit in the subjugation of labour through the mantra of productivity?

Paper presented at 'Practicing Theory - ASCA International Workshop and Conference 2011', Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, 2nd-4th March 2011 https://asca.uva.nl/programme/archive-conferences/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory.html?1583659550967