La acción de las masas y la acción individual – Piotr Kropotkin

Nuestros compañeros están perfectamente en lo correcto al decir [en su carta] que las huelgas de Mayo son consecuencia de las condiciones económicas generales. Si la vuelta al trabajo en las minas y en la industria del hierro, y si la pobreza espantosa en otros oficios no existiese, no habría huelga alguna, así como no las había a tan gran escala diez años atrás. Pero lo que ignoran nuestros compañeros es que, fuera de todas las organizaciones socialistas, ahora mismo, en los trabajadores de todas las nacionalidades, se está desarrollando una inmensa labor por avanzar hacia una huelga general.
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Afraid of our roots

machete-rwanda

Anarchism asserted itself within the First International as a movement of revolt against the centralized, authoritarian and State-centred Marxist tendencies. Later marxism specialized in electoral politics while anarchism developed a vigorous anti-parliamentarian character. In its first decades of life, militant anarchism was a revolutionary movement advocating a social system based on libertarian communism, which was to be achieved through social revolution, i.e. through the destruction of the State and of all orders and privileges, by recourse to the direct action of individuals along with the oppressed, dispossessed masses. The project was too plain to offer anything to political calculation, too radical to allow niches to the comfortable liberalism of well-heeled revolutionaries, too intransigent to make itself available to the intrigues of opportunism. In order to be carried out, this project required that one’s ideas be resolute and steady, it required determination and unselfishness, all things that were rare among the avid crowd of political adventurers. Our first comrades were good-hearted, honest intellectuals and intelligent and generous workers, always ready, the former as well as the latter, to take up arms and struggle for the triumph of anarchy. Until the first wave of revisionism came over.

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Palestine, mon amour

Palestine

Alfredo M. Bonanno

No one can understand what is happening in the land of Palestine, not even those who have followed the bloody course of events involving the people who have lived there for so long. They face each other with hatred and suspicion, not just men and women, children and old people, but the very dust of the roads and the mud that covers them on rainy days, the asphyxiating heat and the stench of the sultriness.
There is no prospect of peace in sight. The ideal solution, at least as far as all those who have the freedom of peoples at heart can see, would be generalised insurrection. In other words, an intifada starting from the Israeli people, that is capable of destroying the institutions that govern them and of proposing peace based on collaboration and mutual respect with the Palestinian people directly, without intermediaries. But for the time being this perspective is only a dream. We must prepare for the worst.
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SYRIA: The life and work of anarchist Omar Aziz, and his impact on self-organization in the Syrian revolution

syria-sos-omar-aziz-homs-free-congregation-17-2-2013

Omar Aziz (fondly known by friends as Abu Kamel) was born in Damascus. He returned to Syria from exile in Saudi Arabia and the United States in the early days of the Syrian revolution. An intellectual, economist, anarchist, husband and father, at the age of 63, he committed himself to the revolutionary struggle. He worked together with local activists to collect humanitarian aid and distribute it to suburbs of Damascus that were under attack by the regime. Through his writing and activity he promoted local self-governance, horizontal organization, cooperation, solidarity and mutual aid as the means by which people could emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the state. Together with comrades, Aziz founded the first local committee in Barzeh, Damascus.The example spread across Syria and with it some of the most promising and lasting examples of non-hierarchical self organization to have emerged from the countries of the Arab Spring.
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