What a great thing the Rebel City collective are doing! The London anarchist group are going into schools as part of ‘the national curriculum’ and talking to young people about a world without bosses, states, money or oppression.
They are opening a vista onto a possible future of mutual aid, co-operation and equality.
This book consists of questions asked by students with answers from Rebel City plus their friends and relations. This means that the book is written in plain…
This academic yet accessible book addresses the myth that revolutionary, liberatory social transformation is no longer possible under capitalism, and also the notion that the tension between individualist and collectivist anarchism somehow makes anarchism itself impossible.
Clark demonstrates that contemporary capitalism has created an environment where, as Frederic Jameson famously said, it is ‘easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism’.
But, like the…
Back in the 1970s, Peace News used to advertise itself in the pages of Freedom, the anarchist paper with these words: ‘“Peace News” – the other anarchist weekly.... “Peace News” for the theory and practice of nonviolent anarchism.’
Freedom no longer exists as a printed paper, sadly – that disappeared 10 years ago – but its online version continues to carry reports of anarchist action around the world.
Peace News has long been committed to…
I got political after I suffered my first racist attack at the age of seven. I didn’t understand any political theory, I just knew that I had been wronged, and I knew there was another way.
A few years later, when I was 15, a marked police car pulled up to me as I walked in Birmingham in the early hours of the morning, three cops got out of the car, they pushed me into a shop doorway, then they beat me up. They got back into their car, and drove off as if nothing had happened.
…
‘“Peace, peace,” they cry’ – Jeremiah
‘The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart’
– Dorothy Day
On Armistice Day, I joined the march for Palestine as it snaked round Victoria. I sighed, I sat down on some steps, looked at the last yellow leaves left on the trees and on the ground and renewed my conviction that at heart I am an anarchist.
Given all that’s written on the subject, how am I qualified to count myself in that…
On 15 February, British anarchists will mark their first ‘Aggravated Activist Day’, after the event was called by participants in a workshop at the Anarchist Bookfair in London last September.
The workshop was run by Netpol, the Network for Police Monitoring, which pointed out in March 2021 that the police had stopped using the label ‘domestic extremist’, and replaced it with ‘aggravated activist’.
Anarchists are classified by the police as taking part in ‘high-level aggravated…
This book shakes things up!
It also opens a space for dialogue, welcoming Muslims, anarchists and anyone engaged with creating a just, peaceful world.
It attempts to offer a vision for building a community of mutual partnership, as an alternative to nation-state structures, capitalist or otherwise. Such a community is inclusive of diverse faiths and spiritualities and grounded in shared, lived, ethico-political values. It also engages with justice in relation to indigenous land…
While preparing this issue, and asking permission to use the graphic on the front page (which is not in the public domain, contrary to what the internet believes), we learned that the revered British anarchist illustrator Clifford Harper was not well (but on the mend).
Clifford is the author of Anarchy: A Graphic Guide and The Education of Desire and has been illustrating radical, alternative and mainstream publications since the 1970s! (You may know him from the…
There have been four Anarchist Studies Network conferences, one every two years since 2010. The theme for this year's fifth conference, 'decolonise', was chosen for two reasons: to confront and tackle the rightward drift of mainstream politics and the rise of 'barefaced nationalism, racism and misogyny', and to address dominating practices in anarchist organising.
I was not involved in the initial discussions of the theme at the 2016 post-conference plenary or in the writing of the…
Donald Rooum has been drawing cartoons for PN since (at least) 1962, and PM’s new selection of his work – many of them featuring his most famous creation, the anarchist moggie Wildcat – takes on a wide variety of familiar targets: religion, the military, police surveillance, the monarchy and capitalism. But we’re also treated to Rooum’s delightfully offbeat takes on Rumplestiltskin and the Garden of Eden (‘When you’re not blackmailing, you quite turn me on’, the miller’s daughter…
As usual, we rang people up to talk anonymously about a topic. This time, something came up for one person that needed more space.
Can I caveat this right before I agree to do this? I feel I am poor on my feet. I don’t do social media partly because I can’t get my head round how people do that. I have a bit of anxiety around this.
The other context is, depending on your topic, really good for your piece or really bad.
I have just been through the most enraging experience…
The letters pages in Peace News have long been a forum for debate on pacifist ideas: the August 1955 issues were no exception. Sid Parker, individualist anarchist, contributed to and edited political publications over many decades; pacifist Denis Barritt lived in Northern Ireland - including during “the troubles” - opposing all armies, ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’.
Anarchist position
There is one paragraph [of a Peace Pledge Union document in a previous PN] with which…
30 April: ‘Came across these 4 young punks in charge of clearing out debris in their
own neighborhood today. This is an all ages show everyone.’ photo: Yuva Ekta
Nepal was hit by a long-predicted earthquake (7.8 on the Richter scale) on 25 April. Over 8,000 people were killed. There were over 100 aftershocks, including a 7.3 quake on 12 May. Yuva Ekta (Youth Unite), a Kathmandu punk band, used its Facebook page to communicate with like-minded folk inside and outside Nepal.…
‘If we want to weaken the state we must strengthen society.’ Colin Ward reminds me of the fundamental principles that drive my actions, and gives me hope with which I can go forward and get involved in dealing with activist topics. His revitalising principles, encapsulated in this short quote, remind us that thinking about social change need not be an armchair activity, or a bottomless slog, but can be an essential part of ultimately getting stuff done.
Ward wrote about all…
In 1978, in a satricial swipe at the burger giant, British sci-fi comic 2000 AD had its fascist anti-hero Judge Dredd visit the nightmarish ‘MacDonald City’ – a dystopia within a dystopia. However, they soon became nervous about libel lawsuits, and the axe finally fell – albeit from a different quarter – when a later episode pitted Dredd against a crazy version of the Jolly Green Giant. Threats of legal action from food giant General Mills forced the comic into publishing a half-…
