Το Νόημα του Αναρχισμού: Συζητώντας τη βιβλιογραφία* - Ελληνική μετάφραση του Πρώτου Κεφαλαίου του βιβλίου των Lucien van der Walt και Michael Schmidt “Black Flame – The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism”

* Αποσπάσματα από το δίτομο έργο «Μαύρη Φλόγα» (υπό έκδοση). Mετάφραση, επιμέλεια: Κωστής read full story / add a comment

Το Νόημα του Αναρχισμού: Συζητώντας τη βιβλιογραφία* - Ελληνική μετάφραση του Πρώτου Κεφαλαίου του βιβλίου των Lucien van der Walt και Michael Schmidt “Black Flame – The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism”
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Το Νόημα του Αναρχισμού: Συζητώντας τη βιβλιογραφία* - Ελληνική μετάφραση του Πρώτου Κεφαλαίου του βιβλίου των Lucien van der Walt και Michael Schmidt “Black Flame – The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism” read full story / add a comment

Το Νόημα του Αναρχισμού: Συζητώντας τη βιβλιογραφία* - Ελληνική μετάφραση του Πρώτου Κεφαλαίου του βιβλίου των Lucien van der Walt και Michael Schmidt “Black Flame – The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism” read full story / add a comment

Το Νόημα του Αναρχισμού: Συζητώντας τη βιβλιογραφία* - Ελληνική μετάφραση του Πρώτου Κεφαλαίου του βιβλίου των Lucien van der Walt και Michael Schmidt “Black Flame – The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism” read full story / add a comment

A partial review of Mark Leier’s Bakunin: A Biography, St Martin’s Press, New York City USA, 2006 – by Michael Schmidt, founder member of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) of South Africa, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Counter-power Vol.1 (AK Press, USA, 2009), and author of Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire (Lux Éditeur, Canada, 2012). read full story / add a comment

Riflessioni sul libro di Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: an Antiauthoritarian History of India's Liberation Struggle (AK Press, USA 2012) e sul suo altro lavoro Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (California World History Library, USA 2011) - a cura di Michael Schmidt, membro fondatore del Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) del Sud Africa, coautore con Lucien van der Walt del libro Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Counter-power Vol.1 (AK Press, USA, 2009), ed autore di Cartographie de l'anarchisme révolutionnaire (Lux Éditeur, Canada, 2012). Questo brano è stato gentilmente rivisto da van der Walt. [English] read full story / add a comment

Meditations on Maia Ramnath’s Decolonizing Anarchism: an Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (AK Press, USA, 2012) and her Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (California World History Library, USA, 2011) – by Michael Schmidt, founder member of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) of South Africa, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Counter-power Vol.1 (AK Press, USA, 2009), and author of Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire (Lux Éditeur, Canada, 2012). This piece was kindly edited by van der Walt. [Italiano] read full story / add a comment

As the US enters yet another election cycle (though it is hard to say whether the US is ever not in election mode these days), it is worth interrogating the current state of the world’s unipolar hyperpower – and of the foreign policy, red in tooth and claw, that affects us all. read full story / add a comment

Le premier tour des élections françaises se tiendra le 22 avril prochain. On s’attend que le candidat socialiste François Hollande prenne le dessus sur le président gaulliste sortant Nicolas Sarkozy, sans obtenir toutefois de majorité préparant le décor à une fuite de capitaux en mai. [English] read full story / add a comment

The first round of French presidential elections will take place on 22 April. Socialist candidate François Hollande is expected to have the edge on incumbent Gaullist President Nicolas Sarkozy, but will likely not earn a majority, which would then set the scene for a run-off in May. But behind the scenes, few French voters are aware of the half-century-long secret system of la valise, “the suitcase” system whereby African dictators send millions of francs to corrupt the European political process - by literally buying the French Presidency. [Français] read full story / add a comment

This is the text of a talk given by Michael Schmidt, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of the book Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, USA, 2009), at the DIRA bookstore in Montréal, Canada, on 18 March 2010, as part of his Black Flame tour of Canada. Thanks to Marie-Eve Lamy of Lux Éditeur, Montréal, for the transcription. read full story / add a comment

US President Barack Obama’s military regime (for as commander-in-chief of the world’s largest military machine, his is not merely a mild “administration”), has proven once again that when it comes to American imperialism’s dealing with the darker majority of humanity, having a black man in the Oval Office simply doesn’t matter. read full story / add a comment

The murder, apparently at the hands of two black farm-labourers, of thuggish AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche on March 20 in what was once South Africa’s white supremacist Western Transvaal heartland, was celebrated by anti-racists the world over. Inside South Africa, it had the expected result of dire, unfounded panic over a looming race war, and the unexpected result of the rush by mainstream parties to defend the ultra-right’s “right to exist in a democracy”. We hear a lot about race and continuing racism in post-apartheid South Africa, but who are the Boers, what function did the AWB serve the nationalist elites, and what does the debate over the killing reveal – or obscure – about the country’s forgotten poor whites? read full story / add a comment

This study of recent anti-imperialist resistance in Kurdistan, looking back to the anarchist resistance in the Ottoman heartland in the period before the formation of the Turkish state, consists of extracts – kindly proof-read in part by Will Firth – from the forthcoming book by Schmidt & van der Walt, Global Fire: 150 Fighting Years of International Anarchism & Syndicalism, Counter-power Vol.2, AK Press, USA, scheduled for release in about 2011. read full story / add a comment

Black Flame co-author Michael Schmidt held a mini-launch of the book at a colloquium with professors of journalism and international affairs at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Guadalajara, Mexico, on October 26. Schmidt was invited to Mexico to train Tec students in covering conflict in transitional societies, especially given the drug war currently ravaging Mexican society. Extracts of his talk, “The Journalist as Activist,” in which he located activist journalism within the Mexican anarchist tradition, follow: read full story / add a comment

A comienzos del siglo XX, el anarquismo se convirtió en un movimiento de masas en Checoslovaquia, Hungría y Polonia – los anarquistas ya habían participado en los levantamientos de Bosnia-Herzegovina contra el dominio Austro-Húngaro. Sin embargo, fue principalmente en Bulgaria y en su vecina Macedonia donde tuvo lugar un notable caso de organización anarquisa, en medio del juego de poder entre las grandes potencias. Este movimiento, escasamente estudiado, no sólo se desangró en luchas de liberación nacional y oposición armada contra el fascismo y el estalinismo, sino que desarrolló un movimiento de masas diverso y resistente, el primero que adoptó la controvertida Plataforma de 1926 de los makhnovistas ucranianos exiliados en París [2] como su marca. Por estas razones es vital que el movimiento comunista libertario revivido en el nuevo milenio reexamine el legado de los Balcanes. Este artículo, que comienza hacia 1919, es una versión de un extracto de la obra de dos volúmenes sobre anarquismo y sindicalismo, contrapoder, co-escrita por Lucien van der Walt, una historia y teoría global sobre el movimiento, que fue publicada por AK Press en los EE.UU. en 2008. [Italiano] [Ελληνικά] [English] read full story / add a comment

In June 2009, one of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s most renowned accusers, Judge Juan Salvador Guzmán Tapia, visited South Africa on a speaking tour. Dean of the Law School at the Universidad Central de Chile in Santiago, and also a lecturer in human rights at the School of Journalism at the Universidad de la República, Guzmán was originally a Pinochet supporter, but turned against him after being selected by judicial lottery in 1998 to hear the 186 criminal charges against the man who, until his death in 2006, cast such long shadows over Chilean political life.

For those Chileans who took to the streets of their poblaciones in the early 1970s and mid-1980s to demand the release from Robben Island of Nelson Mandela and for an end to the apartheid regime in South Africa, the rightward shift of the African National Congress (ANC) with its embrace of anti-working-class neoliberalism is likely to be confusing. How did the world’s most celebrated new democracy come to be marred by ongoing violent protests by the poor against “their” government, faced down by police as bloody-minded as before, by continued housing evictions and mass forced removals so evocative of the depths of apartheid (1)? This analysis shall attempt to explain the trajectory of South African “democracy” and the failure of the “South African Revolution” by comparison to the Chilean experience of the popular overwhelming of Pinochetist reaction – in which the Left found itself fundamentally defeated, even as it attained its cherished victory.

* This article was written by Michael Schmidt, Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, South Africa, especially for the journal Hombre y Sociedad, which was established in Santiago, Chile, in 1985. It was kindly proof-read by José Antonio Gutierrez Dantón, Hombre y Sociedad editor 1997-2003, and co-founder of the Frente de Estudiantes Libertarios (FEL) and in 1999 of the Congreso de Unificación Anarco-Comunista (CUAC) which led to the establishment of today’s Organización Comunista Libertaria (OCL), Chile. read full story / add a comment

* Το κείμενο αυτό γράφτηκε από τους Lucien Van Der Walt και Michael Schmidt, μελών του νοτιοαφρικάνικου Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF – Αναρχικό Κομμουνιστικό Μέτωπο Zabalaza) και συγγραφέων του βιβλίου “Black Flame – The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism” (Volume I) AK Press 2009. Δημοσιεύτηκε στο ομώνυμο περιοδικό Zabalaza. Ελληνική μετάφραση “Ούτε Θεός-Ούτε Αφέντης”, Ιούνης 2009.
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Het is met veel plezier dat de ZACF de aankondiging verwelkomt van een nieuw pan-Aziatisch online anarchistisch blad, Jalan: een blad van Aziatische Bevrijding www.jalanjournal.org Hun verklaring bij de oprichting volgt. read full story / add a comment