Tag Archives: 1019

Citizen of the World

Horace_Vernet-Barricade_rue_Soufflot

Ernest Coeurderoy – Citizen of the World

One selection I really regret not including in Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas is the following piece by Ernest Cœurderoy (1825-1862), excerpted from his Jours d’exil (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1910-11, originally published 1854-55) and translated by Paul Sharkey. Coeurderoy is perhaps best known for his Hurrah!!! Ou La Révolution par les Cosaques (London, 1854; republished by Editions Plasma, Paris, 1977), in which he envisioned a Cossack invasion of France to sweep away all vestiges of authority, with a libertarian socialist society emerging from the ruins.
Continue reading Citizen of the World

N° 4 dell’Internazionale Situazionista

variis58

Da principio fu la critica dell’arte e l’individuazione di snodi essenziali affinché l’arte, morta nelle sue forme, potesse finalmente esprimersi nella vita. Poi ci fu l’esercizio dell’arte della critica che si coniugò, nella misura possibile offerta dalla storia, con la sovversione sociale ed intellettuale. Questa può essere la sintesi del percorso dell’I.S. negli anni in cui fu attiva.
La scelta di pubblicare la collezione completa dei dodici numeri dell’Internazionale Situazionista, che coprono l’arco di undici anni, e di pubblicarla quasi fosse in facsimile ancorché ovviamente in traduzione italiana e finalmente corretta, nasce dal desiderio di fornire uno strumento a tutti coloro che vogliono inserirsi nella storia e nella pratica dell’intelligenza critica; togliere di mano agli “specialisti”, per lo più di nessun conto e valore, il monopolio della conoscenza dei testi.
Continue reading N° 4 dell’Internazionale Situazionista

Forming the National Front of Australia: ASIO and the fledgling far right group

screen-shot-2015-11-28-at-8-22-43-am

On Saturday June 2, 1978, a group of nine people gathered in a room of the Southern Cross Hotel in the Melbourne CBD to launch the National Front of Australia (NFA). According to the ASIO informant, nine people attended the meeting, including several well-known far right activists, a 16 year old schoolboy and an undercover reporter for the newspaper The Age. Seven out of the nine listed were already known to the authorities in some regard. The meeting was led by a 23 year old law student and army reservist, Rosemary Sisson, who had travelled to the UK in 1977 to seek permission from the National Front’s John Tyndall to establish an NF in Australia. According to ASIO, Tyndall had appointed Sisson to be Chairwoman of the NFA until a directing body was created. In a report on Sisson by the Victorian Police’s Special Branch, Sisson was described in these terms:
Continue reading Forming the National Front of Australia: ASIO and the fledgling far right group

What An Individual Is

630x44.fitwithoffset

Han Ryner

An individual is a complex, indefinable object. And so only the individual possesses something that can without lying be called existence. As the Cynic philosophers already knew, nothing real, nothing concrete is definable.

The necessities of thought, speech, of science and action force us to act as if the definable exists. Let us consent to this, while all the while smiling at the inevitable.

But we should never forget that no word can give us the essence of a being, not even my own essence, and that no thought, whatever good will and sympathy might animate it, will ever penetrate the essence of another. Our most beautiful, strongest, most penetrating truths glory — modestly — in being but lesser lies.

The more I strive to seize the concrete, the more my formulas become complex and hesitant, then the more I become irritated at not being able to make them flexible and mobile. Whenever I pronounce absolute words I know I am speaking in the abstract and that I am speaking of the void.

(La Melée no. 29, August 1, 1919; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2005; Transcribed: by Mitch Abidor.)