Chilean libertarians are celebrating. It is 10 years since the birth - on 21 May 2003 in the city of Valparaíso - of one of the organizations of the libertarian political project that has achieved greatest national influence: the Libertarian Students' Front (FEL). [Castellano] ... read full story / add a comment

There are about 5 million employees in Romania, currently. Some other 3 million people (a quarter of the local work force) work in other countries from the European Union, mostly Spain and Italy. The official unemployed people are said to represent 6.7%, but this is not accurate. This number covers only people who have been registered, and it is not calculated according to the entire number of people who could work but are left out. Therefore, the real number of the unemployed people is not really known (or it is not reported by the government), but a logic deduction puts it somewhere at an additional one million people. [Română] ... read full story / add a comment

Dublin City Council have new by laws to permit officials to interrogate members of the public as to how they are disposing of their rubbish. When the councils started charging for waste disposal years back numerous people refused to pay, the councils then withdrew their collections and ultimately the service was privatised. At the time of the introduction of a fee for rubbish collection some environmentalists argued it was a good thing that would lead to greater recycling and lower waste production. The councils began charging for recycling also of course. ... read full story / add a comment

I still have to encounter a serious critique of capitalist (and anti-capitalist) political economy that stresses the capitalist system's main nature as a huge gambling casino. As most capitalists cannot know in advance if and how much there will be of a market for the products and services they produce and provide and at what price, they are mostly gamblers... ... read full story / add a comment

Yes to mass struggle and its protest and resistance
No to the militia & tribal war
No to wage war and the States intervention against the mass struggle and its resistances ... read full story / add a comment

Marxists argue that anarchists really do advocate a state, or something indistinguishable from one, but do not admit it. But what anarchists advocate is the overturning of the existing state and the creation of a new, nonstate, association of councils, assemblies, and a popular mililtia. There is no such thing as a "workers' state." ... read full story / add a comment

On the eve of International Women’s Day, so-called men’s rights advocates at the University of Toronto hosted an event confronting women’s studies and academic feminism. This was a follow-up to their event in November featuring self-proclaimed ex-feminist Warren Farrell, author of the book the Myth of Male Power. Warren Farrell is best known for his statements about women making false accusations of rape and his argument that incest can be a positive experience, if only women were not socialized to be victims. ... read full story / add a comment

The risk of a coup d'état in Venezuela continues to be a real one, with more right-wing media analysis even betting that Nicolás Maduro will not finish his term. Apart from political Chavism, the guarantees of acquired rights are in the balance. [Português] ... read full story / add a comment

Many people in South Africa were shocked by the death of at least 13 South African National Defence Force (SANDF) troops when rebels overran their base in the capital of the Central African Republic (CAR). Amongst the public and within the media questions soon started arising around the possible reasons why troops were in CAR to begin with. When it emerged that troops were possibly partly deployed to protect businesses in CAR linked to top African National Congress (ANC) officials, there was widespread outrage. The fact that South African troops were involved in protecting the political and economic interests of wealthy people linked to the South African state in CAR, and other African countries, should perhaps, however, not come as a surprise. Throughout its history, whether during apartheid or post apartheid, the South African state – which is controlled by the ruling class and headed up by members of this class - has been most willing to deploy troops in parts of Africa to protect the political, economic and strategic interests of the South African ruling class.
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This essay is an argument for moving towards national organization in the United States. It explores the limitations of political organization today, recent positive experiences, and possible ways to build on the present to push forward. ... read full story / add a comment

Below I reproduce excerpts from a recent report at Truthout by Joshua Stephens on the constructive efforts by Greek anarchists to create alternatives to capitalism and the nation-state. The approaches they have been developing since the uprising in 2008 are similar to those proposed by Alexander Berkman based on his experiences during the Russian Revolution. Directly democratic popular assemblies formed the basis of the anarchist collectives during the Spanish Revolution, and were later championed by Murray Bookchin. Stephens refers to Colin Ward, whose ground breaking article on anarchism as a theory of organization is included in Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Anarchist alternatives to capitalism and hierarchical organization are well documented in all three volumes of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, now on sale at AK Press. ... read full story / add a comment

South Africa is an extremely unequal society. The post-apartheid dispensation has seen the situation of the majority poor black working class worsening. On the other side of the coin, a few elites have ‘made it’ in capitalism and through the state, often through the elitist forms of ‘Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment and corruption. Inequality in South Africa is easily illustrated when one observes the massive disparities in development, service delivery and wealth between townships and rural areas on the one hand, and suburban areas on the other. Should massive disparities in service delivery between wealthy and poor neighbourhoods be put down to corruption, mismanagement, administrative incapacity and a lack of consultation? Or is there something in how the state is structured and the way in which it rules which means that it can never give the majority of people what they need? ... read full story / add a comment

An interview for theRealnews about Cyprus crisis with proffesor of economics in University of London ... read full story / add a comment

We have to ask ourselves how we have found ourselves in unions where the leadership was allowed take such an approach. And we have to work out how we create unions that we control and which will help us organise together to defend our common interests. How has it come to this? ... read full story / add a comment

It has been over a month since the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) held their one-day protest of the provincial Liberal Party leadership convention, mobilizing some 15,000 people on the streets of Toronto and then sending them all home again around 4:00 PM. The protest was part of the trade union response to Bill 115, which enabled the provincial government to circumvent collective bargaining and mandate the terms of new “collective agreements”. [Italiano] ... read full story / add a comment

The government says if we Vote no to Croke Park they will impose it anyway. Many of the union leadership try and scare us into voting Yes with this threat and by saying the only alternative is strike action. Both are right. If we just vote no than the government will attack us. And when they do the only way we can win is if we are willing to fight back - that will mean industrial action. It will almost certainly mean at least the credible threat of an indefinite strike. ... read full story / add a comment

Regarding the election of Bergoglio as the new pope, Luis D'Elía said: "Francis I is for Latin America what John Paul II was for the Soviet Union. The new aim of the empire to destroy South American unity".
Without actually embracing this point of view, this comparison manages to capture an essential element: cracks are becoming apparent in the former bastion of Catholicism. With the advance of the evangelical churches, Latin American Catholicism has lost the monopoly on religion. [Castellano] ... read full story / add a comment

This is a piece we’re sharing originally posted to Machete 408 by Adam Weaver. It is a review/summation piece is being released in conjunction with a forthcoming piece by Scott Nappolas which presents an extensive discussion of Lenin’s concept of democratic centralism. ... read full story / add a comment

The terrain is changing beneath our feet. Since the collapse of the majority of the “official communist” regimes, the world has witnessed both events and ideas that have undermined the former dominant thinking within the left. The Zapatistas, Argentina in 2001, South Korean workers movements, Oaxaca in 2006, the struggles around anti-globalization, and Greece’s series of insurrectionary moments have increasingly presented challenges to traditional left answers to movements and organization. In previous eras Marxist-Leninism was the nexus which all currents by default had to respond to either in agreement or critique. Today, increasingly anarchist practices and theory have come to play this role.

As a member of an anarchist political organization, a friend once told me I in fact was practicing democratic centralism. This was perplexing, because the group had no resembling structures, practices, or the associated behaviors of democratic centralism. However, I was told that since we debated, came to common decisions, and acted on that collective democracy, we were in fact democratic centralist. This kind of productive confusion led to questions about the concept, and why the target of democratic centralism has shifted. This move, the shifting conceptual territory of core concepts of a certain orthodoxy, comes up repeatedly not only with democratic centralism, but also surrounding ideas like crisis, dialectics, the State, and class. The resulting cognitive dissonance caused me to investigate attempts at reinvigorating the concept of democratic centralism (democratic centralist revisionism), and understand truly what it is, where it came from, and how it has been practiced. ... read full story / add a comment

We will no longer see one of the most important men in Latin America in the last decade. It is impossible not to be somewhat shaken by this fact. We do not doubt that they will be celebrating with the most expensive champagne in Chacao. Naturally that is not our feeling, nor is it that of the Venezuelan masses. We can only feel solidarity with them in their sense of grief over the passing of one who in recent years was their undisputed leader and benchmark for the popular movement across the continent. [Castellano] ... read full story / add a comment