Although traces of anarchist ideas are found all throughout history, modern anarchism emerged from the Enlightenment. During the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement flourished in most parts of the world and had a significant role in workers' struggles for emancipation. Various anarchist schools of thought formed during this period. Anarchists have taken part in several revolutions, most notably in the Paris Commune, the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, whose end marked the end of the classical era of anarchism. In the last decades of the 20th and into the 21st century, the anarchist movement has been resurgent once more, growing in popularity and influence within anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation movements. (Full article...)
Golos Truda (The Voice of Labour) was a Russian languageanarcho-syndicalist newspaper. Founded by working-class Russian expatriates in New York in 1911, Golos Truda shifted to Petrograd during the Russian Revolution in 1917, when its editors took advantage of the general amnesty and right of return for political dissidents. There, the paper integrated itself into the nascent anarcho-syndicalist movement, pronounced the necessity of a social revolution of and by the workers, and situated itself in opposition to the myriad of other left-wing movements.
The rise to power of the Bolsheviks marked the turning point for the newspaper however, as the new government enacted increasingly repressive measures against the publication of dissident literature and against anarchist agitation in general, and after a few years of low-profile publishing, the Golos Truda collective was finally expunged by the Stalinist regime in 1929. (read more...)
Documentations, Informations, Références et Archives (DIRA)/L'Insoumise, Montreal's anarchist infoshop/bookstore, boulevard St Laurent, March 2007. DIRA serves as a free community lending library and archive of material relevant to anarchism.
...that scholarly journal Anarchist Studies was attacked by Stewart Home as a "sad and reactionary 'academic' journal" incapable of engaging in critical debate?
...that the Cubanlabor movement was predominantly anarchist until it was crushed first by President Machado, and then Fidel Castro?
So anarchists keep asking themselves the same question: What is anarchism? What does it mean to be an anarchist? Why? Because it is not a definition that can be made once and for all, put in a safe and considered a heritage to be tapped little by little. Being an anarchist does not mean one has reached a certainty or said once and for all, ‘There, from now on I hold the truth and as such, at least from the point of view of the idea, I am a privileged person’. Anyone who thinks like this is an anarchist in word alone. Instead the anarchist is someone who really puts themselves in doubt as such, as a person, and asks themselves: What is my life according to what I do and in relation to what I think? What connection do I manage to make each day in everything I do, a way of being an anarchist continually and not come to agreements, make little daily compromises, etc? Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life, and life, young or old as we may be, whether we are old people or children, is not something final: it is a stake we must play day after day. When we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the ground we must have a good reason for getting up, if we don’t it makes no difference whether we are anarchists or not. We might as well stay in bed and sleep. And to have a good reason we must know what we want to do because for anarchism, for the anarchist, there is no difference between what we do and what we think, but there is a continual reversal of theory into action and action into theory. That is what makes the anarchist unlike someone who has another concept of life and crystallises this concept in a political practice, in political theory.
This is what is not normally said to you, this is what you never read in the newspapers, this is what is not written in books, this is what school jealously keeps quiet about, because this is the secret of life: never ever separate thought from action, the things we know, the things we understand, from the things we do, the things with which we carry out our actions.
1848 - During this month Mikhail Bakunin participates in Slav Congress in Czechoslovakia, where he speaks & presents papers; he also participates in the Whitsuntide insurrection here. Also during this month, Karl Marx publishes a false report that Bakunin is a Russian agent responsible for the arrest of Poles.
1850 - During this month Mikhail Bakunin's death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment in Germany. Extradited to Austria, he is imprisoned in Prague. (He was condemned to death on January 14, 1850 while held in the Königstein fortress.)
1861 - During this month Mikhail Bakunin escapes from Siberia (today or tomorrow), via the Amur River, arriving in Nikolavsk in July; he sails on the Strelok to Kastri where he boards an American merchant ship, Vickery, to Hakodate, Japan.
1917 - On the eve of the official military registration day, Emma Goldman, among others, addresses a mass meeting organized by the No-Conscription League.
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