Anarchist Communist Group members are saddened to hear about the death of veteran Irish anarchist, Alan MacSimoin.
Alan started his political life with Official Sinn Fein’s youth organization when still at school but broke with republicanism and went on to help set up Dublin Anarchist Group in 1978. Later he was involved in setting up the Anarchist Workers Alliance and later still he was a founder member of the Workers Solidarity Movement. Although Alan parted company with the WSM more recently, he nevertheless continued to be active politically until his death. Alan was on the platformist wing of the libertarian movement.
A number of ACG members have had comradely dealings with Alan over the decades. One ACG member says... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Albert Meltzer who died on 7th May this year aged 76, had been a class struggle anarchist from the age of 16. He took part in work around the Spanish Revolution and was a member of the editorial board of War Commentary, (which changed its name to Freedom at the end of the war). This anarchist fortnightly maintained a consistent revolutionary anti-war stand, and an outstanding quality and level of writing. During the fifties Meltzer retired from the movement, returning to edit a number of pamphlets produced by his Coptic Press and to work with the group producing Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review which addressed itself to cultural as well as directly political issues. Together with Stuart Christie he began producing the monthly Bulletin of ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Over the years, the name Andre Senez could be read at the foot of the back page of many French anarchist and libertarian papers as “Director” of the publication- a paper cannot by law be published in France unless it has this State requirement and risks instant confiscation. Many veterans of the French libertarian movement have warm memories of Andre Senez, with his unflinching convictions and his solidarity. He died on the evening of 20th February after reaching his 80th birthday last October. Old worker in the shoe industry in Paris, an expert in his work, he had retired to the Touraine region to be close to his family. At the age of 15, he joined the youth section of the Communist Party, which he left very quickly after the s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Cornelius Castoriadis was born Kornelios Kastoriades in Istanbul to a Greek family. Growing up in Athens he joined the Young Communists in 1937 and the Communist Party in 1941. During the war he read “several books that had miraculously escaped the auto da fes of the dictatorship: Souvarine, Ciliga, Serge, Barmine”. He joined a group on the extreme left of Trotskyism, and was involved in the resistance to the German occupiers. At the end of the war he was physically threatened by both fascists and Stalinists, forcing him to leave for France. Here he joined the French section of the Trotskyist Fourth International, but broke with it in 1948. Along with Lefort and Lyotard, he helped set up the Socialisme ou Barbarie group,( S ou B... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The vetern Bulgarian anarchist Georgi Grigoriev has died at the age of 90 in Sofia. He began to call himself an anarchist from the age of 14, and a year later joined the Anarchist Communist Federation of Bulgaria (FACB) which had been founded in 1919. Emerging from semi-clandestinity, the anarchist movement began to develop among both urban and rural workers and among both youth and intellectuals..
Georgi himself narrowly escaped a murder bid by a Royalist gang in 1925, and was forced to take refuge in Czechoslovakia. He then became an agronomics student in France. Here he joined a large number of Bulgarian anarchists, who had fled viaYugoslavia and Austria. Most of the group settled in Toulouse and this 35-strong group, of which Georgi, u... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
This French comrade of Arab origin has died on 21 February 1997. Born on 10 August 1950 he went to the schools organized by Michelin for their workers. Because of his North African background, school life was difficult for him and he remained forever marked by the humiliations he received there. He started work at Michelin among the ‘sans grades’ (the unskilled and lowest grade of worker). He became an anarchist in May 1968 when he actively participated in the worker-student liaison. His concern for effective organization led him to join the Organization Revolutionnaire Anarchiste (ORA). He served several prison terms for his active solidarity with Spanish and Portuguese Anarchists in struggle against Franco and Salazar. His unc... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Life long activist and council communist Gerrard Van De Berg died February this year after a long illness. Gerrard was active in the workers struggles in his native Netherlands and across Europe. A member of the communist tendency influenced by Anton Pannekoek, he was a strong opponent of authoritarianism. Lenin’s polemic “Left Wing Communism- An Infantile Disorder” was directly aimed against him and his comrades. Gerrard was a carpenter by trade and was active in the workers movement and greatly respected for his integrity and fierce intelligence. He used whatever medium he could to get his message across: broadcasting on the airwaves or talking face to face he gained the respect of those who listened. He was in Paris in ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Manolo Gonzalez was born in Spain in the late 1920s, escaped from Franco with his anarchist family in 1939, and eventually settled in the SF Bay Area, where he wrote, and taught at the University of San Francisco as well as briefly at New College of California.
Nothing like this should ever happen. We found out that long-time Contributing Editor Manolo Gonzalez had died when issue #58 came back to us marked “Return to Sender. Deceased.”
I first met Manolo when we both lived in San Francisco. Jason gave me his phone number, I called him up, and we made a date to meet at his apartment. I spent the next five hours visiting as we got to know each other. My then-partner joined us after her workday ended, and Manolo s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Fredy Perlman, born August 20, 1934, Brno, Czechoslovakia, died July 26, 1985 Detroit, Michigan
Fredy Perlman was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1934. He emigrated with parents to Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1938 just ahead of the Nazi takeover. The Perlman family came to the United States in 1945 and lived variously in Mobile, Alabama, Brooklyn, Queens before settling in Lakeside Park, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio where Fredy graduated high school.
In 1952 he attended Morehead State College in Kentucky and then UCLA from 1953–55. Fredy was on the staff of The Daily Bruin, the school newspaper, when the reactionary university administration fired all of the editors of the publication. The five editors, i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
It is with great sadness that we have to report the passing of our Bulgarian comrade, Alexander Nakov, who died in Pernik on 10th November 2018, aged 99 years. The Anarchist Communist Group sends its heartfelt sympathy and solidarity to Alexander’s family, friends and comrades, both in Bulgaria and around the world.
Alexander became an anarchist in 1936, inspired by news of the Spanish revolution. He remained steadfastly committed to his anarchist principles for the rest of his life. He joined the Federation of Anarchist Communists in Bulgaria (FACB) and was highly active in what was effectively a mass anarcho-communist organization with deep roots in the urban and rural working class, before it was crushed by the Stalinist gov... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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