We want to publish more reports from anarchists organising in their workplaces, and we want you to write them for us.  Your experiences are valuable. It is important that we write about organising in order to reflect, learn, and share lessons. We need anarchists to write about wins, losses, failed attempts and mistakes made. It is not enough to simply read accounts of organising in the past (as much as that is valuable), we need to learn about what is working and what isn’t right now. An organising report needs to cover: The context. What is the industry? What work do you perform? What a ..read more

Chris Oliver argues that left-wing activists should focus less on shallow mobilisation and protest, and more on deep, long-term organising. A few years ago I was involved in protesting outside a café in Sydney alongside a backpacker who’d previously worked there. The backpacker had been paid below the minimum wage the entire time they’d been employed, and all attempts at dialogue with the boss had proven futile. Having gotten nowhere with negotiations, we set out to protest at the cafe until the owner paid up all of the money that was owed. The whole thing took a lot of effort. Three weekends ..read more

Republished from Geelong Anarchist Communists by Tommy Lawson and Evan van Zijl As critics of genocide and Zionism, we are often told that settlement of Palestine offers a liberal utopia of pro-gay progressivism. Israel, the supposed sanctuary of Judaism, is in short the only alleged place for women and the LGBTQI+ community to be safe from Islam in the Middle East. These claims erupt most clearly in moments of crisis when there is more blood than even liberals believe can be justified, and are part of the argument that Arabs and Muslims do not have a right to life. We need to be clear that th ..read more

‘In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.’ Martin Luther King Jr.  It is no secret that the history of Palestinian resistance is deeply intertwined with the socialist movement. As anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism are basic principles, socialists have always opposed the occupation of Palestine by both Britain and Israel. Anarchist-Communists are part of the broader socialist movement and said principles are just as, if not more, deeply embedded in the tradition.1 However, in the face of the latest barbarity unleashed by Israel upon the ..read more

Juan Verala Luz reviews Anarchist Popular Power: Dissident Labor and Armed Struggle in Uruguay 1956-1976. This review began as opening remarks at a recent book launch for Anarchist Popular Power. You can read excerpts from the original statement in this report, and listen to it alongside a discussion with historian Troy Araiza Kokinis in a forthcoming It’s Going Down podcast episode. Arriba los que luchan! Lessons in Struggle from Uruguayan Anarchists Compounding crises that neither capitalism nor the nation-state can solve have compelled many newcomer and veteran mili ..read more

Every so often the question of co-operatives is raised in the revolutionary socialist movement. Optimistic positions suggest that co-ops can form the basis for replacing capitalism with a new economy based on solidarity and labour where workers have ‘control’ and even suggest they are a vital part of revolutionary strategy. These positions have both contemporary and historical antecedents and the arguments still continue. However the positive features of cooperatives are still no replacement for revolutionary strategy and building working class power against capitalism. Debates over the role o ..read more

David Glanz, a member of the Trotskyist organisation Solidarity, recently gave a talk on the Spanish Revolution, offering it as evidence of the ‘failure of anarchism’. The talk is reasonably representative of the standard Leninist position, and therefore follows the same tendency to misrepresent both the events in Spain and the content of anarchist theory. In misrepresenting anarchism, Glanz is unable to recognise that the real failure of the anarchist movement in Spain was in breaking with anarchist ideas, rather than implementing them. Furthermore, an honest accounting of the facts shows tha ..read more

First published as ‘The Ukraine War’, in The Anvil Vol 12 No 3. After the fall of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine became independent. The United States promised Russia that NATO would not expand eastwards, but it didn’t take long for Uncle Sam to renege. Without a global rival to consider, and concerned to find a new mission for NATO after the end of the Cold War, successive US Presidents agreed to requests from most countries in Eastern Europe to join. As each individual new member sought security in NATO, the threat of NATO to Russia increased. In a world of competing States, security for one is b ..read more

Originally published in The Anvil, vol. 12, no. 2. Iraq On the 20th of March 2003, the United States, at the head of a “coalition of the willing”, in which both Britain and Australia were prominent, invaded Iraq. The main justification offered was the need to destroy Saddam Hussein’s supposed cache of weapons of mass destruction, which was to be achieved by overthrowing his regime.    The invasion was carried out in defiance of international law and the biggest series of coordinated demonstrations in the history of the world.    Contrary to many peoples’ expectations, the Iraqi military quickl ..read more

In the aftermath of anti-Trans bigotry and violence in Melbourne and Sydney some progressive activists have focused their wrath on socialists rather than the bigots, police or the state. Attacks on the right of socialists to openly organise and proclaim their politics only strengthens the powers that be and undermines solidarity. Revolutionaries of every tendency should support one another in the face of liberal reaction. On the 18th of March anti-Trans bigot Posie Parker’s “Let Women Speak” tour stopped in Melbourne. Neo-Nazis from the National Socialist Network turned up in support of her ev ..read more