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Some people are just born as natural rebels. Stuart Christie is such a person. He was born in 1946 in working-class Glasgow, Scotland, into a world split in two by the ever-present sectarian rift between the Catholics and Protestants. Christie was a member of the Orange Order growing up, an anti-Catholic Protestant fraternal organization. When he came of age, however, he went through a metamorphosis of left-wing thinking. After meeting with members of the Coal Miners' Union, Christie became an anarchist. He was 16. From that point on, his life would revolve around the ideals of anarchism, which stands for social justice, community autonomy, and individual liberty.
Soon after, Christie became involved with the anti-nuke movement in Scotland, where he saw all the different varieties of the radical movement, from pacifist liberals to labor party hacks to Trotskyites to the anarchists. He quickly became impatient with the nonviolent protest marches, which were seemingly ignored, and longs to do more. When talking to older Anarchists, he learns of the fight in Spain a mere twenty-five years before, where the ideas of Anarchism nearly achieved success in the farms and factories of Catalonia in Eastern Spain. If it hadn't been for the betrayal by the Stalinist forces, the anarchists would of beat Franco's fascists and prevented the dictator from taking power. This recent history had a huge affect on the young Christie and he decided to attempt to kill Franco, under the assumption that the end of Franco would mean the end of his regime.
At only 18 years in 1964, he links up with a Spanish Anarchist group and makes his way to Spain through France. Upon entering Franco's Madrid, he is almost immediately arrested by Brigada Politico Social (BPS), the Spanish secret police, who were supplied information on his arrival by the British Scotland Yard. That the British secret service would collaborate with the fascists amazed Christie. During the interrogation and beatings, his explosives are quickly discovered by the police, and the only thing that saves him and the Spanish anarchists arrested with him from a quick execution is his foreign citizenship, since Spain at the time was trying to soften it’s image to attract tourism and foreign money and didn’t want to scare either away by executing foreigners or those involved with them. Christie enters Spanish prison on a thirty year prison term, and quickly meets the "politicos" or political prisoners, which are a variety of trade unionists, anarchists, socialists, communists, and any other dissenter in Franco's Spain. Later in his life in British prisons, Christie realized that the liberal democracy of Britain's jails were much worse than the jails of Franco's fascist Spain, in brutality, isolation, food, and exercise, amongst other things. Quickly, he becomes the center of an international campaign to free him by radicals to free him, though he is ignored by Amnesty International for accepting violence and because he admits guilt.
Eventually after three years in a Spanish prison in 1967, Christie is freed when his grandmother writes to Franco and Franco decides to score points in order to attract more British and other European tourists to Spain by showing mercy. When he returns to Scotland, dogged by the press, he noticed that Britain has changed a lot during his years in jail, as rebellion and disobedience and rock music became the new norm for the Youths of England and the rest of the West, specifically protesting the US war in Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and a host of other actions attacking the established order of thing. Christie did his best to fit back into the world, moving to London and becoming an electrian for a trade. He joined Albert Meltzer's Wooden Shoe Bookshop on Compton Street, and restarted the Anarchist Black Cross which fights for political prisoners, and co-founded the long-running "Black Flag" magazine with Meltzer, an anarchist investigative and analytical magazine, and helped raise money for the "First of May Group", a Spanish-anarchist resistance group to Franco's regime. However, these activities also brought him near constant police harassment, surveillance, and media attention calling for his imprisonment.
In 1970, as the war in Vietnam roared on and the limits of pacifism and peaceful demonstrations became apparent, the author goes on to tell us that many left-wing youths involved started to turn to more militant and violent actions, like the Weathermen in the US, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and in the UK the Angry Brigade. These groups, with varying levels of success, took the guerilla warfare aspects of Mao Zedong and Che Guevera to "bring the war home", in actions such as bombing campaigns, kidnappings, propaganda deeds, and acts of sabotage. The Angry Brigade, a group influenced by anarcho-syndicalists and situationist politics but never outward about their politics, claimed responsibility for 25 bombings in the UK from 1970 to 1972, targeting at government offices, banks, and the homes of conservative politicians, though only targeting property and not killing anyone (unlike later bombings done by IRA, PLO, and Basque groups), as well as releasing political statements explaining their actions. Christie, though sympathetic to the Angry Brigade, has nothing to do with their activities and stays away from any extra-legal activities. This does not stop Scotland Yard from trying to scape-goat him as a well-known Anarchist as a member of the Angry Brigade.
In 1972, Christie was arrested on “conspiracy to cause explosions” from planted evidence by the British "bomb squad" which had been organized to catch the Angry Brigade. He was arrested along with a dozen other British radicals After a very long trial, he is found not guilty of all charges and the others only guilty of conspiracy. Christie notes that one of the keys to their victory is that in the trial, they made sure that the jury was as working class as possible. Why? Because during the course of the trial, the defense proved that the defendants were simply normal working class people, with regular worries and jobs, with different political beliefs who were being persecuted, to the point of even planting evidence, by the Crown as scapegoats. After the trial, Christie also notes that the British prosecution of political trials from then on would be held outside of the cities and in middle-class dominated areas, similar to how in the US, many trials against Blacks are stacked with White jurists.
Stuart Christie helped run Cienfuegos Press, a radical publisher which he founded, from 1974 until 1982, and continues to be active in anarchist publishing projects in the UK. "Granny Made Me An Anarchist" is a really humorous book, and a thing I really enjoyed was that he never assumed that you knew the terms he was talking about, and therefore inserts many excerpts throughout the book explaining terms, periods, groups, and historical events, like Anarchism, The First of May Group, Francisco Franco, the Angry Brigades, etc. He examines his past with a critical eye but never apologizes for anything he's done, since he has nothing to be ashamed of and remains true to the values and actions of his youth (though he hasn't tried to blow up anymore dictators since then.) He's also very funny and doesn't take himself so seriously at any point, a thing you can tell that he came from humble beginnings and never really got away his raising by his Granny and Mum, a truly good person he is. This book is a great find for anyone who has trouble keeping idealistic in troubling times.
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I believe in the right to self-defense, and the right to carry weapons, and on the left, I find myself very alone a lot of the time in the US. In much the same way that the government wages a war of prohibition against drugs that continues to swell our prison system but doesn't do a thing to fix violence in our society, I also believe the rush to ban guns is also a power ploy that doesn't stop violence but merely disarms people and makes them even more vulnerable to attack. Any individual or group under attack deserves the right to defend themselves from unjust harm, especially against military or police or thugs. More right wing groups like the National Rifle Association, however, defend the right to keep guns from an entirely different prospective. They define it as a way for "law-abiding citizens" (usually white) to defend themselves against criminals (usually black), and a way for patriots to defend their country from the UN or immigrants or whomever, and I don't really see it that way. I see guns as a way for groups or individuals to keep themselves safe as they act as a deterrent from attacks if others know that the gun-carrier can fight back. In fact, it carries to other weapons and martial arts forms that people ought to know to defend themselves against attack, but I digress. I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania (Susquehanna County) until I was 14, a place where we got the first day of hunting season off from school because of how many people hunted. It might not make much sense to urban and suburban dwellers, but I knew a lot of people who supplemented their income by shooting animals and selling them to butchers, or just eating the stuff they shot. Now, in Philadelphia as violence and murder escalates, there is a call to give Philadelphia its own gun laws instead of trying to tackle poverty and joblessness.
All this aside, the gun debate in the US is one where both sides are damned in my opinion. I picked up the book "Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy", by Joan Burbick, hoping that it might be a breath of fresh air. Burbick, a shooter herself, explores the culture of the gun show and the "gun nut", and the underlying politics of the NRA, as well as explaining their view of the world. It takes a few chapters to realize her points of view, but she also sees the right-wing "2 nd Amendment" movement as a cover for white-supremacist and male domination and an attempt at trying to maintain the status-quo, convincingly so. She argues that the gun was used by the right-wing to roll back some of the gains of the Civil Rights era in the US. In effect, the gun issue was used by conservatives as a Trojan horse issue to fight back against what they saw as an attack on their traditional family-oriented values and way of life. She also argues that all-white rifle clubs in the 1800s were used by Southern white supremacists to keep blacks "in their place" during and after Reconstruction.
Groups like the John Birch Society get along very well with the NRA in that they see the federal government as taking away people's right to defend themselves (which sort of makes sense), yet they are in favor of a strong and large military at the same time (which doesn't make sense). In the pages of the "American Rifleman", the magazine of the NRA , throughout its 80 years of existence, they glorify the model citizen as a "rugged frontiersman" dressed in buckskins, independent, and strong, with a strong work ethic. Always implied, of course, was that this citizen was also white . This played into the Cold War image against groups working together such as unions or civil rights groups or Communist collectivism. The NRA's literature was peppered with mentions of fighting against Communist infiltration, though it tried to stick to hunting and sport fishing. Only in the late 1970s, when Charleton Heston and Bill Loeb took over the NRA and ousted the moderates, and indeed started targeting the Republican Party as did a host of other groups like the Christian Coalition (much the way labor unions and civil rights groups targeted the Democratic Party). The 1980s and the rise of the Reaganites to the government also brought movies like Terminator and Rambo with muscle-bound men shooting up entire armies by themselves. This is the atmosphere in which Charleton Heston said his famous "From my cold, dead, hands" while holding up an old flintlock. Thus guns became the issue for white guys who wanted to fight back from the gains of women and people of color.
In doing research for her book, Joan Burbick went to hundreds of gun shows and spoke to lots of different people. She encounters all sorts of people obsessed with guns, and learns quickly that gun shows are a multimillion dollar business. During the Cold War, military surplus made guns both cheap and available, and the international arms trade boomed. The UN draws special ire from gun show enthusiasts for trying to clamp down on this trade. Burbick also notices that most of the crowd at gun shows are white guys, and that confirms my suspicion when I had a subscription to "The American Rifleman", in which I can rarely ever remember seeing a person of color in its pages. It should be noted that the NRA has it's base in rural places, in which the vast majority of which are white, but it doesn't even seem like they're trying to outreach to people other than whites (though they do reach out to white women.)
One aspect of the book I seriously disagreed with is when Joan Burbick recounts an incident in the 1873 at Colfax, Louisiana, when a black militia was massacred trying to defend themselves from a white mob. She states that "Easter Sunday, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana would prove once and for all that African Americans could not defend with arms either their lives or their right to vote even if they were members of a local militia" (referring to the fact that whites often formed militias) In stating this, she isolates this one incident in a time period where blacks were particularly vulnerable to attack. In the 1950s, wide-spread chapters of the "Deacons for Defense" not only defended blacks from attack during the civil rights organizing, but forced government officials to deal with groups like Student Non-violence Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King's Southern Leadership Conference (the pacifist activists). In the late 1960searly 1970s, the Black Panthers for Self-Defense Party took inspiration from them and carried weapons around regularly, though they were encouraged not to use them unless attacked, as well as organizing free breakfast meals, education, and health services. The American Indian Movement did similar things and also believed in the right to self-defense. Granted, the last two groups were targeted by the government COINTELPRO repression for being "violent" even though they were simply advocating for self-defense, but that's not really surprising given the history of the US government (and most other governments.) But to leave these examples out of her critique of gun culture really amazes me. While I suppose she was trying to focus on the "gun-nut" people like the NRA and gun shows, the history of weapons and guns in this country is not as black and white as it is painted by either side of the argument.
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Emma Goldman is one of the big name names of American anarchists, as well as one of the earlier to contribute to free speech, birth control, and the labor movements. She was an amazing public speaker, something that is lost in this day of television and radio, and her writing still ranks amongst the classics of Anarchist thought for a free and just society. From her involvement in the shooting of Frick (though Alexander Berkman was a lousy shot) to free speech fights to labor struggles in Massachusetts to getting deported by Edgar Hoover, all the way to being amongst the first radicals to denounce the government of the Bolsheviks (which ostracized her amongst the left), and finally working to raise funds for the Spanish Revolutionary cause. She was jailed for fighting against the draft, advocating for birth control, and for "inciting a riot." In a lot of ways, the stuff she said then was visionary for the time period. She remains one of the most amazing people in history, and someone who gave her all so others could be free and live in a just world.
"Dangerous Woman: A Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman" can be best described as a graphic novel version of "Living My Life", and it's a real treat. The artist, Sharon Rudahl, does a great job capturing Goldman's turbulent and unique life, growing from a fiery Jewish peasant girl fleeing Russia to an active Anarchist speaker and organizer hated by the government, to the patron-saint of the American Anarchist movement, though small by the time of her death. She spares no detail, especially the parts about Emma's sex life and her many partners over the years. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when she has been sent by her mentor, Johann Most, on a speaking tour "Against the 8 Hour Day" (it was too little and was too reformist and not revolutionary enough.) She encounters an older man in the Chicago stop of the tour who tells her that while he understands why young people would be impatient with small demands, but "I won't live to see the revolution. Will I never have a little time for reading or to walk openly in the park?" After this encounter, Emma vowed never to let doctrine or ideology get in the way of a good fight that brought real change to real people's lives. That's a lesson that a lot of radicals then and now could learn and take to heart.
Today, the closest we in the United States have to an Emma Goldman is academics in ivory towers, as loud mouth voices in the sea of state and corporate rule. The speaking tours of yesterday is the youtube, internet, music albums and television of today, which is much more controlled than speaking in public used to be, though less prone to violent disruption by people who disagree with the author. It's hard to imagine a story like hers again where someone from such a humble beginning devotes her entire life, to the point where she refused to correct health problems like infertility, to the cause of fighting the existing order, and becoming such an international figure as she did. Maybe a new Emma Goldman of the internet or TV or music like hiphop will arise to become an inspiration to people's movements everywhere, like Subcommader Marcos in Chiapas has, or elsewhere. It's hard to say. Either way, check out Emma's life in graphic novel comic form, because she's a real life superhero in a way that Superman never could be.
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People have been asking about this one for a long time. This book came out in Spanish a few years ago and was already heavily asked requested. Now, an English translation let me read this for the first time, and it's no disappointment! Horizontalism is about the social movements in Argentina since the economy collapsed in December of 2001, seemingly a part of the bigger movements for social justice sweeping across Latin America. What I really liked about this book is that it's from the point of view of people participating in the movement. It's really seemingly different from a lot of stuff, from the ground-up and not imposed by elites or cadres. It really seems like it's out of the grassroots struggles of Argentina, and the December 19 th and 20th 2001 economic collapse were just events that turned people out in mass in an uprising.
The book is divided into sections based on interviews, getting different perspectives on different subjects. The first section deals with how people thought the country changed in December 2001, and hundreds of neighborhood assemblies suddenly appeared throughout the country. In a country where 30,000 people disappeared in the 1980s during the military dictatorship, all of the sudden when no one, even the middle class, could get their money, thousands of people in Buenos Aires took to the streets and banged pots into the night. From there, people began gathering in their neighborhoods to try to run their own places, took over factories and other workplaces where the management had either fled or owed the workers large amounts of money, and occupied buildings that were not being used, which flew in the face of clientilism of Argentina. The famous roadblocks, where people blocked off roads across the country to shut down commerce as protests of the poor of the country, also appeared across Argetina. The popular call was "Oh, que se vayan todos!" ("They all must go!", referring to the nation's "democratically" elected politicians.) A sudden burst of anger from most people sick of the ruling class pretending to represent the will of the people brought down five Presidents in a matter of two weeks. The elites and political parties and financial organizations like foreign companies and the World Bank literally had no part in any of this upheaval other than being the target of anger, cast away like sand against the waves.
From there, in the assemblies, a process of "horizontalidad" became the big philosophy. Before there would be a boss of any organization, and any real decisions would originate from above. But in the assemblies and collectives, people worked together for their common well being, equal in power at least in structure, often with consensus instead of voting. Several people interviewed commented that while having a boss or simple voting for decision making might be easier, you lose the power to the people when you go the easy route. There are several great lines about how the walk is just as important as the talk, and how bullshit speeches and posturing doesn't take a group of people very far. It's really interesting how an idea is put together and made stronger by a group of people interacting and listening where the most powerful, well-done stuff happens.
"Martin S., La Toma and Argetina Arde (an occupied building and alternative media and art collective)
What does horizontalidad mean? First, that there isn't one right way; there isn't anyone that has the truth and tells us what we have to do. It means seeing each other as equals, or trying to see each other as equals. It also means - and this is something that's a challenge for the assemblies - learning to listen to one another. The assembly is like a game, it's really interesting. Someone comes up with an idea and the idea is elaborated upon by someone else, then someone else expands or changes it, and then as you listen, another person improves the idea, or says something totally different. The initial person might say "no" or agree, and this is how we move forward. It's like the game where a group makes up a story together. One person says "the house" and the next says "the house is" and the next "the house is in" and then "the house is in the mountains." If someone is in the assembly not listening, but talking, and trying to move forward with something else… Or if that person just makes statements or speeches, which sometimes happens, things really don't go anywhere."
Another section is on autogestion, or workers' self-management, focusing on how the explosions of December 19th and 20th gave worker activists, who had been fighting management for years beforehand on issues like safety, being owed back-wages, and simple dignity on the job, a chance to show a different way of doing things. Owed tons of money, workers kept factories, clinics, bakeries and distribution centers opened, but kept the profits for themselves instead of giving it over to a boss. Nearly 200 companies were taken over in this fashion. Though they still operate under "the market," the fact that they have no bosses is a very important step since we still live in a capitalist world. The workers face evictions and fight tooth and nail to keep what they have gained. Many actually stayed in the factories because "they didn't have enough money to get home" and were sick and tired of being walked all over their entire lives. They decided to make the workplaces into services for their neighborhoods and communities instead of for the rich. Many have been shut down since then by the government and repression, but there are also many still operating today.
Another chapter deals with women. Beforehand, machismo seemed very widespread in Argentina. Several people, especially women, note that amongst the very first people rushing to the forefront to get the neighborhood assemblies together and setting up road blockades were women, who had traditionally taken care of the children, and also the most hardcore activists in the fight for a better future were mostly women. It is also noted that as men started to take the lead of women, some started to go back to their old roles of men talking more than anyone else. But many women's collectives and groups start during this time, as people begin to realize it's okay to speak out against the old forms of oppression.
It should be noted that there is a good chapter on repression as well by the state and it's allies, so not to give the impression that everything is lala-happy in Argentina or that revolutionary work has been completed. For instance, there was several instances of police killing people at the roadblocks, and then lying about it later on, saying they had been killed in accidents. People have been assassinated, and violent evictions of occupied spaces where owners had fled during the collapse are widespread. Only due to much pressure have local governments only accepted the ownership of the spaces by the occupiers. Sometimes, groups even reject government aid so they do not get tied to the state too much as well.
I'm leaving out a lot of parts because I don't want to give away too much, but this is really a beautiful book and very nice to see it from the point of view of people actually doing the walk instead of just doing the talk. I really got to give Sitrin a lot of credit for letting people speak for themselves. It's very hard to say what will happen in Argentina in the next few years, or Latin America, or the world for that matter, but I'm really glad I got a chance to read the experiences of these people in Argentina striving to create a world without oppression or hierarchy. They're trying to build a place everyone has the power to decide what is best for their community and work and themselves, and actually trying to build such a world right now, in this world, like the old phrase "building a new world in the shell of the old." I do have some questions of how to defend this world from it's enemies, like the state or defenders of the old ways, and how they're doing this down in Argentina. For the most part, this book is incredibly inspirational to anyone who simply dreams of a better place right here on Earth.
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I really like stories of people's jobs, and no one I've ever read about has had more jobs then Disherwasher Pete. The author of the long-run cult favorite zine "Dishwasher" has put out this great book by the same name. Pete decided at a very long age when he had a hard time figuring out what he wanted to do for his life, that he liked to travel and see the country, and that dishwashing was the way to do it. He put up a goal of going to all 50 states to wash dishes. This is his autobiography of those journeys. And as a former dishwasher, I love this even more.
It's one of those books you can't put down because it's so wild. He talks about his time aboard oil rigs, loads of evil, sick, and twisted bosses, grungy work conditions, the ability to quit a job that screws with him in any possible way (and believe me, he takes advantage of that, fulfilling the impulse of every worker in America.) Along the way, as he puts out his zine, he develops a reputation as a "Master Dishwasher" and treats the reader to the underground world of dishwashing, of sorts, like eating off of the bus tray buffet (sometimes I never got enough of when I was working as a pearl diver). He ends up on David Letterman (actually, just a friend of his impersonating him), has tons of near dates, and tells about the great history of dishwasher unions and the loyalty they have (to the exclusion of the servers and the cooks.) He doesn't spare the reader of descriptions of nasty kitchens full of roaches and rodents, and drinking on the job to pass it by.
Pete really lives a lot of people's dreams, and refuses to let it end until he's at the age of 35, having been to every state in the union and seen a lot more than most people do in their whole lives. He's got such a sense of humor that's so self-depricating but at the same time proud that he doesn't let anyone tell him how to be. Everywhere from racist Louisiana resteraunt owners to hippy communes who try to sucker him into doing more than he wants, Pete always seems to end up on top. He lives dollar to dollar and makes every buck count in his travels, but always confident he can find another job, because once you washed one dish, you can wash any dish.
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Granny Made Me an Anarchist: General Franco, the Angry Brigade and Me by Stuart Christie
jgeneric, February 7, 2008
Some people are just born as natural rebels. Stuart Christie is such a person. He was born in 1946 in working-class Glasgow, Scotland, into a world split in two by the ever-present sectarian rift between the Catholics and Protestants. Christie was a member of the Orange Order growing up, an anti-Catholic Protestant fraternal organization. When he came of age, however, he went through a metamorphosis of left-wing thinking. After meeting with members of the Coal Miners' Union, Christie became an anarchist. He was 16. From that point on, his life would revolve around the ideals of anarchism, which stands for social justice, community autonomy, and individual liberty.Soon after, Christie became involved with the anti-nuke movement in Scotland, where he saw all the different varieties of the radical movement, from pacifist liberals to labor party hacks to Trotskyites to the anarchists. He quickly became impatient with the nonviolent protest marches, which were seemingly ignored, and longs to do more. When talking to older Anarchists, he learns of the fight in Spain a mere twenty-five years before, where the ideas of Anarchism nearly achieved success in the farms and factories of Catalonia in Eastern Spain. If it hadn't been for the betrayal by the Stalinist forces, the anarchists would of beat Franco's fascists and prevented the dictator from taking power. This recent history had a huge affect on the young Christie and he decided to attempt to kill Franco, under the assumption that the end of Franco would mean the end of his regime.
At only 18 years in 1964, he links up with a Spanish Anarchist group and makes his way to Spain through France. Upon entering Franco's Madrid, he is almost immediately arrested by Brigada Politico Social (BPS), the Spanish secret police, who were supplied information on his arrival by the British Scotland Yard. That the British secret service would collaborate with the fascists amazed Christie. During the interrogation and beatings, his explosives are quickly discovered by the police, and the only thing that saves him and the Spanish anarchists arrested with him from a quick execution is his foreign citizenship, since Spain at the time was trying to soften it’s image to attract tourism and foreign money and didn’t want to scare either away by executing foreigners or those involved with them. Christie enters Spanish prison on a thirty year prison term, and quickly meets the "politicos" or political prisoners, which are a variety of trade unionists, anarchists, socialists, communists, and any other dissenter in Franco's Spain. Later in his life in British prisons, Christie realized that the liberal democracy of Britain's jails were much worse than the jails of Franco's fascist Spain, in brutality, isolation, food, and exercise, amongst other things. Quickly, he becomes the center of an international campaign to free him by radicals to free him, though he is ignored by Amnesty International for accepting violence and because he admits guilt.
Eventually after three years in a Spanish prison in 1967, Christie is freed when his grandmother writes to Franco and Franco decides to score points in order to attract more British and other European tourists to Spain by showing mercy. When he returns to Scotland, dogged by the press, he noticed that Britain has changed a lot during his years in jail, as rebellion and disobedience and rock music became the new norm for the Youths of England and the rest of the West, specifically protesting the US war in Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and a host of other actions attacking the established order of thing. Christie did his best to fit back into the world, moving to London and becoming an electrian for a trade. He joined Albert Meltzer's Wooden Shoe Bookshop on Compton Street, and restarted the Anarchist Black Cross which fights for political prisoners, and co-founded the long-running "Black Flag" magazine with Meltzer, an anarchist investigative and analytical magazine, and helped raise money for the "First of May Group", a Spanish-anarchist resistance group to Franco's regime. However, these activities also brought him near constant police harassment, surveillance, and media attention calling for his imprisonment.
In 1970, as the war in Vietnam roared on and the limits of pacifism and peaceful demonstrations became apparent, the author goes on to tell us that many left-wing youths involved started to turn to more militant and violent actions, like the Weathermen in the US, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and in the UK the Angry Brigade. These groups, with varying levels of success, took the guerilla warfare aspects of Mao Zedong and Che Guevera to "bring the war home", in actions such as bombing campaigns, kidnappings, propaganda deeds, and acts of sabotage. The Angry Brigade, a group influenced by anarcho-syndicalists and situationist politics but never outward about their politics, claimed responsibility for 25 bombings in the UK from 1970 to 1972, targeting at government offices, banks, and the homes of conservative politicians, though only targeting property and not killing anyone (unlike later bombings done by IRA, PLO, and Basque groups), as well as releasing political statements explaining their actions. Christie, though sympathetic to the Angry Brigade, has nothing to do with their activities and stays away from any extra-legal activities. This does not stop Scotland Yard from trying to scape-goat him as a well-known Anarchist as a member of the Angry Brigade.
In 1972, Christie was arrested on “conspiracy to cause explosions” from planted evidence by the British "bomb squad" which had been organized to catch the Angry Brigade. He was arrested along with a dozen other British radicals After a very long trial, he is found not guilty of all charges and the others only guilty of conspiracy. Christie notes that one of the keys to their victory is that in the trial, they made sure that the jury was as working class as possible. Why? Because during the course of the trial, the defense proved that the defendants were simply normal working class people, with regular worries and jobs, with different political beliefs who were being persecuted, to the point of even planting evidence, by the Crown as scapegoats. After the trial, Christie also notes that the British prosecution of political trials from then on would be held outside of the cities and in middle-class dominated areas, similar to how in the US, many trials against Blacks are stacked with White jurists.
Stuart Christie helped run Cienfuegos Press, a radical publisher which he founded, from 1974 until 1982, and continues to be active in anarchist publishing projects in the UK. "Granny Made Me An Anarchist" is a really humorous book, and a thing I really enjoyed was that he never assumed that you knew the terms he was talking about, and therefore inserts many excerpts throughout the book explaining terms, periods, groups, and historical events, like Anarchism, The First of May Group, Francisco Franco, the Angry Brigades, etc. He examines his past with a critical eye but never apologizes for anything he's done, since he has nothing to be ashamed of and remains true to the values and actions of his youth (though he hasn't tried to blow up anymore dictators since then.) He's also very funny and doesn't take himself so seriously at any point, a thing you can tell that he came from humble beginnings and never really got away his raising by his Granny and Mum, a truly good person he is. This book is a great find for anyone who has trouble keeping idealistic in troubling times.
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Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy by Joan Burbick
jgeneric, December 27, 2007
I believe in the right to self-defense, and the right to carry weapons, and on the left, I find myself very alone a lot of the time in the US. In much the same way that the government wages a war of prohibition against drugs that continues to swell our prison system but doesn't do a thing to fix violence in our society, I also believe the rush to ban guns is also a power ploy that doesn't stop violence but merely disarms people and makes them even more vulnerable to attack. Any individual or group under attack deserves the right to defend themselves from unjust harm, especially against military or police or thugs. More right wing groups like the National Rifle Association, however, defend the right to keep guns from an entirely different prospective. They define it as a way for "law-abiding citizens" (usually white) to defend themselves against criminals (usually black), and a way for patriots to defend their country from the UN or immigrants or whomever, and I don't really see it that way. I see guns as a way for groups or individuals to keep themselves safe as they act as a deterrent from attacks if others know that the gun-carrier can fight back. In fact, it carries to other weapons and martial arts forms that people ought to know to defend themselves against attack, but I digress. I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania (Susquehanna County) until I was 14, a place where we got the first day of hunting season off from school because of how many people hunted. It might not make much sense to urban and suburban dwellers, but I knew a lot of people who supplemented their income by shooting animals and selling them to butchers, or just eating the stuff they shot. Now, in Philadelphia as violence and murder escalates, there is a call to give Philadelphia its own gun laws instead of trying to tackle poverty and joblessness.All this aside, the gun debate in the US is one where both sides are damned in my opinion. I picked up the book "Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy", by Joan Burbick, hoping that it might be a breath of fresh air. Burbick, a shooter herself, explores the culture of the gun show and the "gun nut", and the underlying politics of the NRA, as well as explaining their view of the world. It takes a few chapters to realize her points of view, but she also sees the right-wing "2 nd Amendment" movement as a cover for white-supremacist and male domination and an attempt at trying to maintain the status-quo, convincingly so. She argues that the gun was used by the right-wing to roll back some of the gains of the Civil Rights era in the US. In effect, the gun issue was used by conservatives as a Trojan horse issue to fight back against what they saw as an attack on their traditional family-oriented values and way of life. She also argues that all-white rifle clubs in the 1800s were used by Southern white supremacists to keep blacks "in their place" during and after Reconstruction.
Groups like the John Birch Society get along very well with the NRA in that they see the federal government as taking away people's right to defend themselves (which sort of makes sense), yet they are in favor of a strong and large military at the same time (which doesn't make sense). In the pages of the "American Rifleman", the magazine of the NRA , throughout its 80 years of existence, they glorify the model citizen as a "rugged frontiersman" dressed in buckskins, independent, and strong, with a strong work ethic. Always implied, of course, was that this citizen was also white . This played into the Cold War image against groups working together such as unions or civil rights groups or Communist collectivism. The NRA's literature was peppered with mentions of fighting against Communist infiltration, though it tried to stick to hunting and sport fishing. Only in the late 1970s, when Charleton Heston and Bill Loeb took over the NRA and ousted the moderates, and indeed started targeting the Republican Party as did a host of other groups like the Christian Coalition (much the way labor unions and civil rights groups targeted the Democratic Party). The 1980s and the rise of the Reaganites to the government also brought movies like Terminator and Rambo with muscle-bound men shooting up entire armies by themselves. This is the atmosphere in which Charleton Heston said his famous "From my cold, dead, hands" while holding up an old flintlock. Thus guns became the issue for white guys who wanted to fight back from the gains of women and people of color.
In doing research for her book, Joan Burbick went to hundreds of gun shows and spoke to lots of different people. She encounters all sorts of people obsessed with guns, and learns quickly that gun shows are a multimillion dollar business. During the Cold War, military surplus made guns both cheap and available, and the international arms trade boomed. The UN draws special ire from gun show enthusiasts for trying to clamp down on this trade. Burbick also notices that most of the crowd at gun shows are white guys, and that confirms my suspicion when I had a subscription to "The American Rifleman", in which I can rarely ever remember seeing a person of color in its pages. It should be noted that the NRA has it's base in rural places, in which the vast majority of which are white, but it doesn't even seem like they're trying to outreach to people other than whites (though they do reach out to white women.)
One aspect of the book I seriously disagreed with is when Joan Burbick recounts an incident in the 1873 at Colfax, Louisiana, when a black militia was massacred trying to defend themselves from a white mob. She states that "Easter Sunday, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana would prove once and for all that African Americans could not defend with arms either their lives or their right to vote even if they were members of a local militia" (referring to the fact that whites often formed militias) In stating this, she isolates this one incident in a time period where blacks were particularly vulnerable to attack. In the 1950s, wide-spread chapters of the "Deacons for Defense" not only defended blacks from attack during the civil rights organizing, but forced government officials to deal with groups like Student Non-violence Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King's Southern Leadership Conference (the pacifist activists). In the late 1960searly 1970s, the Black Panthers for Self-Defense Party took inspiration from them and carried weapons around regularly, though they were encouraged not to use them unless attacked, as well as organizing free breakfast meals, education, and health services. The American Indian Movement did similar things and also believed in the right to self-defense. Granted, the last two groups were targeted by the government COINTELPRO repression for being "violent" even though they were simply advocating for self-defense, but that's not really surprising given the history of the US government (and most other governments.) But to leave these examples out of her critique of gun culture really amazes me. While I suppose she was trying to focus on the "gun-nut" people like the NRA and gun shows, the history of weapons and guns in this country is not as black and white as it is painted by either side of the argument.
(8 of 13 readers found this comment helpful)
Dangerous Woman: the Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman (07 Edition) by Sharon Rudahl
jgeneric, November 23, 2007
Emma Goldman is one of the big name names of American anarchists, as well as one of the earlier to contribute to free speech, birth control, and the labor movements. She was an amazing public speaker, something that is lost in this day of television and radio, and her writing still ranks amongst the classics of Anarchist thought for a free and just society. From her involvement in the shooting of Frick (though Alexander Berkman was a lousy shot) to free speech fights to labor struggles in Massachusetts to getting deported by Edgar Hoover, all the way to being amongst the first radicals to denounce the government of the Bolsheviks (which ostracized her amongst the left), and finally working to raise funds for the Spanish Revolutionary cause. She was jailed for fighting against the draft, advocating for birth control, and for "inciting a riot." In a lot of ways, the stuff she said then was visionary for the time period. She remains one of the most amazing people in history, and someone who gave her all so others could be free and live in a just world."Dangerous Woman: A Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman" can be best described as a graphic novel version of "Living My Life", and it's a real treat. The artist, Sharon Rudahl, does a great job capturing Goldman's turbulent and unique life, growing from a fiery Jewish peasant girl fleeing Russia to an active Anarchist speaker and organizer hated by the government, to the patron-saint of the American Anarchist movement, though small by the time of her death. She spares no detail, especially the parts about Emma's sex life and her many partners over the years. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when she has been sent by her mentor, Johann Most, on a speaking tour "Against the 8 Hour Day" (it was too little and was too reformist and not revolutionary enough.) She encounters an older man in the Chicago stop of the tour who tells her that while he understands why young people would be impatient with small demands, but "I won't live to see the revolution. Will I never have a little time for reading or to walk openly in the park?" After this encounter, Emma vowed never to let doctrine or ideology get in the way of a good fight that brought real change to real people's lives. That's a lesson that a lot of radicals then and now could learn and take to heart.
Today, the closest we in the United States have to an Emma Goldman is academics in ivory towers, as loud mouth voices in the sea of state and corporate rule. The speaking tours of yesterday is the youtube, internet, music albums and television of today, which is much more controlled than speaking in public used to be, though less prone to violent disruption by people who disagree with the author. It's hard to imagine a story like hers again where someone from such a humble beginning devotes her entire life, to the point where she refused to correct health problems like infertility, to the cause of fighting the existing order, and becoming such an international figure as she did. Maybe a new Emma Goldman of the internet or TV or music like hiphop will arise to become an inspiration to people's movements everywhere, like Subcommader Marcos in Chiapas has, or elsewhere. It's hard to say. Either way, check out Emma's life in graphic novel comic form, because she's a real life superhero in a way that Superman never could be.
(9 of 15 readers found this comment helpful)
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina by Marina Sitrin
jgeneric, October 31, 2007
People have been asking about this one for a long time. This book came out in Spanish a few years ago and was already heavily asked requested. Now, an English translation let me read this for the first time, and it's no disappointment! Horizontalism is about the social movements in Argentina since the economy collapsed in December of 2001, seemingly a part of the bigger movements for social justice sweeping across Latin America. What I really liked about this book is that it's from the point of view of people participating in the movement. It's really seemingly different from a lot of stuff, from the ground-up and not imposed by elites or cadres. It really seems like it's out of the grassroots struggles of Argentina, and the December 19 th and 20th 2001 economic collapse were just events that turned people out in mass in an uprising.The book is divided into sections based on interviews, getting different perspectives on different subjects. The first section deals with how people thought the country changed in December 2001, and hundreds of neighborhood assemblies suddenly appeared throughout the country. In a country where 30,000 people disappeared in the 1980s during the military dictatorship, all of the sudden when no one, even the middle class, could get their money, thousands of people in Buenos Aires took to the streets and banged pots into the night. From there, people began gathering in their neighborhoods to try to run their own places, took over factories and other workplaces where the management had either fled or owed the workers large amounts of money, and occupied buildings that were not being used, which flew in the face of clientilism of Argentina. The famous roadblocks, where people blocked off roads across the country to shut down commerce as protests of the poor of the country, also appeared across Argetina. The popular call was "Oh, que se vayan todos!" ("They all must go!", referring to the nation's "democratically" elected politicians.) A sudden burst of anger from most people sick of the ruling class pretending to represent the will of the people brought down five Presidents in a matter of two weeks. The elites and political parties and financial organizations like foreign companies and the World Bank literally had no part in any of this upheaval other than being the target of anger, cast away like sand against the waves.
From there, in the assemblies, a process of "horizontalidad" became the big philosophy. Before there would be a boss of any organization, and any real decisions would originate from above. But in the assemblies and collectives, people worked together for their common well being, equal in power at least in structure, often with consensus instead of voting. Several people interviewed commented that while having a boss or simple voting for decision making might be easier, you lose the power to the people when you go the easy route. There are several great lines about how the walk is just as important as the talk, and how bullshit speeches and posturing doesn't take a group of people very far. It's really interesting how an idea is put together and made stronger by a group of people interacting and listening where the most powerful, well-done stuff happens.
"Martin S., La Toma and Argetina Arde (an occupied building and alternative media and art collective)
What does horizontalidad mean? First, that there isn't one right way; there isn't anyone that has the truth and tells us what we have to do. It means seeing each other as equals, or trying to see each other as equals. It also means - and this is something that's a challenge for the assemblies - learning to listen to one another. The assembly is like a game, it's really interesting. Someone comes up with an idea and the idea is elaborated upon by someone else, then someone else expands or changes it, and then as you listen, another person improves the idea, or says something totally different. The initial person might say "no" or agree, and this is how we move forward. It's like the game where a group makes up a story together. One person says "the house" and the next says "the house is" and the next "the house is in" and then "the house is in the mountains." If someone is in the assembly not listening, but talking, and trying to move forward with something else… Or if that person just makes statements or speeches, which sometimes happens, things really don't go anywhere."
Another section is on autogestion, or workers' self-management, focusing on how the explosions of December 19th and 20th gave worker activists, who had been fighting management for years beforehand on issues like safety, being owed back-wages, and simple dignity on the job, a chance to show a different way of doing things. Owed tons of money, workers kept factories, clinics, bakeries and distribution centers opened, but kept the profits for themselves instead of giving it over to a boss. Nearly 200 companies were taken over in this fashion. Though they still operate under "the market," the fact that they have no bosses is a very important step since we still live in a capitalist world. The workers face evictions and fight tooth and nail to keep what they have gained. Many actually stayed in the factories because "they didn't have enough money to get home" and were sick and tired of being walked all over their entire lives. They decided to make the workplaces into services for their neighborhoods and communities instead of for the rich. Many have been shut down since then by the government and repression, but there are also many still operating today.
Another chapter deals with women. Beforehand, machismo seemed very widespread in Argentina. Several people, especially women, note that amongst the very first people rushing to the forefront to get the neighborhood assemblies together and setting up road blockades were women, who had traditionally taken care of the children, and also the most hardcore activists in the fight for a better future were mostly women. It is also noted that as men started to take the lead of women, some started to go back to their old roles of men talking more than anyone else. But many women's collectives and groups start during this time, as people begin to realize it's okay to speak out against the old forms of oppression.
It should be noted that there is a good chapter on repression as well by the state and it's allies, so not to give the impression that everything is lala-happy in Argentina or that revolutionary work has been completed. For instance, there was several instances of police killing people at the roadblocks, and then lying about it later on, saying they had been killed in accidents. People have been assassinated, and violent evictions of occupied spaces where owners had fled during the collapse are widespread. Only due to much pressure have local governments only accepted the ownership of the spaces by the occupiers. Sometimes, groups even reject government aid so they do not get tied to the state too much as well.
I'm leaving out a lot of parts because I don't want to give away too much, but this is really a beautiful book and very nice to see it from the point of view of people actually doing the walk instead of just doing the talk. I really got to give Sitrin a lot of credit for letting people speak for themselves. It's very hard to say what will happen in Argentina in the next few years, or Latin America, or the world for that matter, but I'm really glad I got a chance to read the experiences of these people in Argentina striving to create a world without oppression or hierarchy. They're trying to build a place everyone has the power to decide what is best for their community and work and themselves, and actually trying to build such a world right now, in this world, like the old phrase "building a new world in the shell of the old." I do have some questions of how to defend this world from it's enemies, like the state or defenders of the old ways, and how they're doing this down in Argentina. For the most part, this book is incredibly inspirational to anyone who simply dreams of a better place right here on Earth.
(10 of 19 readers found this comment helpful)
Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (P.S.) by Pete Jordan
jgeneric, October 31, 2007
I really like stories of people's jobs, and no one I've ever read about has had more jobs then Disherwasher Pete. The author of the long-run cult favorite zine "Dishwasher" has put out this great book by the same name. Pete decided at a very long age when he had a hard time figuring out what he wanted to do for his life, that he liked to travel and see the country, and that dishwashing was the way to do it. He put up a goal of going to all 50 states to wash dishes. This is his autobiography of those journeys. And as a former dishwasher, I love this even more.It's one of those books you can't put down because it's so wild. He talks about his time aboard oil rigs, loads of evil, sick, and twisted bosses, grungy work conditions, the ability to quit a job that screws with him in any possible way (and believe me, he takes advantage of that, fulfilling the impulse of every worker in America.) Along the way, as he puts out his zine, he develops a reputation as a "Master Dishwasher" and treats the reader to the underground world of dishwashing, of sorts, like eating off of the bus tray buffet (sometimes I never got enough of when I was working as a pearl diver). He ends up on David Letterman (actually, just a friend of his impersonating him), has tons of near dates, and tells about the great history of dishwasher unions and the loyalty they have (to the exclusion of the servers and the cooks.) He doesn't spare the reader of descriptions of nasty kitchens full of roaches and rodents, and drinking on the job to pass it by.
Pete really lives a lot of people's dreams, and refuses to let it end until he's at the age of 35, having been to every state in the union and seen a lot more than most people do in their whole lives. He's got such a sense of humor that's so self-depricating but at the same time proud that he doesn't let anyone tell him how to be. Everywhere from racist Louisiana resteraunt owners to hippy communes who try to sucker him into doing more than he wants, Pete always seems to end up on top. He lives dollar to dollar and makes every buck count in his travels, but always confident he can find another job, because once you washed one dish, you can wash any dish.
(21 of 37 readers found this comment helpful)
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