Milan Rai
On 7 April, the organisers of the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair excluded two people from the gathering, which was taking place in the huge Black-E community arts centre near the city centre.
Brian Bamford, a member of the Northern Anarchist Network, was told in advance that he would not be allowed in, and was stopped at the door. Another man (whose name is not known) was taken from a workshop by…
Do you want to base your views about aggression, violence, war and peace on the available biological/psychological evidence? Do you have the stamina for 700 very challenging pages? Yes and yes? Here’s the book for you.
Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst looks at first sight like just another popular psychology book. I expected brain scans, hormones and genes, and there is a lot about those topics.
What I didn’t expect was a…
On 19 March, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (led until July 2017 by Christopher Pitchford) posted the previously-secret Special Demonstration Squad Tradecraft Manual on its website (see accompanying article for extracts). The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was a section of Special Branch, the British political police, devoted to undercover operations, which existed between 1968 and 2008.…
Organising: organisers invest in two-way relationships with, and give power to, people they recruit, who then go on to recruit other people in the same empowering way.
Are you a lone wolf, a mobiliser or an organiser? And does it make any difference to how much social change you make? I’ve been chewing over questions like this after attending two very different movement events in the last few weeks.
The first was ‘Can we unite for peace?’, a conference in London put on by ‘…
Should the US be talking to North Korea? Definitely. Is a hasty Trump-Kim summit a good idea? Almost certainly not. Still there are ways to make this process more modest, safer and more constructive. Bizarrely, the summit, rather than being the date by which a detailed deal must be agreed, may be more usefully thought of as a confidence-building gesture and as a way of agreeing the final goals of a nuclear-free zone around Korea.
North Korea has been signalling its willingness to…
Daniel Ellsberg is famous as the Pentagon analyst who leaked thousands of pages of top secret…
This is the second in our series of interviews with working-class activists. These are Holly’s words:
“Growing up working-class erodes your confidence, almost by design. I just didn’t feel confident in any life stage, that I’d be able to excel or do well, or that anyone would actually want me as part of what they’re doing. People talk about ‘impostor syndrome’* all the time now. I do believe everyone has it, but if you’re from a disadvantaged background, it’s... it’s…
People's Climate March 2017 in Washington DC. Marchers with sign, "There are no jobs on a dead planet." Author: Dcpeopleandeventsof2017 c/o Wikimedia Commons.
There has rightly been a huge celebration of the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918 and the first parliamentary election votes for some women in Britain (not counting landowners pre-1832).
This has stirred up again the valuable debate about how much this victory owed to…
Ice-skaters Ryom Tae-ok and Kim Ju-sik competing in 2017; they are representing North Korea in the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. Photo: Garrett Wollman CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
There is one simple first step that can help the world to avoid a war between the United States and North Korea: extend the Olympic peace pause in US military exercises and North Korean nuclear/missile testing.
Possibly the most urgent task of the global peace movement is to…
'People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist attack, but I’m not worried about them out there. I worry about what we might do to each other in here.’ – one of the organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, on 28 October.
A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans women. A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship. About 30 trans rights activists then surrounded…
‘When our enemies expect us to respond to provocation with violence, we must react calmly and peacefully; just as they anticipate our passivity, we must throw a grenade.’ This is pretty much the only ‘reflection on the role of armed struggle in North America’ that you will find in Ward Churchill’s 1986 essay, ‘Pacifism as Pathology’. These words, quoted approvingly, are from Black Nationalist activist Kwame Ture (formerly nonviolent civil rights Freedom Rider Stokely Carmichael).
…
These are the footnotes for the double pamphlet written by PN editor Milan Rai in October 2017 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
Many of these references can be verified online - sometimes whole texts have been scanned and placed online. In other cases, a search for the quoted text will bring up the page in the book referred to.
Footnotes for 1917: The Nonviolent Russian Revolution
1 SA Smith, Russia in Revolution:…
Someone once said to me that you know when you’ve lost on an issue when Socialist Worker has an article on ‘the lessons of...’. Okay, this is an article about some of the lessons that came out of our activists’ digital tools project, Zylum. Zylum was a really good idea that responded to real problems still facing many grassroots, very-low budget campaigning groups.
For example, you have a group website. Then the person who set the website up – and who has been maintaining…
The Russian Revolution of 1917 would not have succeeded without fearless nonviolent action by hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers. Even the ‘storming’ of the Winter Palace on 25 October was largely nonviolent. Yes, there was plenty of revolutionary armed action in Russia in the course of 1917, but there were also many extraordinary, inspiring,…
Reviewers agree that Neil Faulkner’s A People’s History of the Russian Revolution is a lively and readable account of the revolutionary events of 1917. It is also a distorted, dishonest disservice to the millions of Russian workers and peasants whose achievements Faulkner claims to celebrate.
Why should this matter to activists today? In particular, why should it matter to people committed to nonviolent revolution?
One reason is that when times get tough, and…
