Revolt Library : Revolutionary Materials from the Past

For many years, I was torn between understanding myself as an artist and as a revolutionary. As I considered the future through the hyperbolic lens of youth, I felt I would eventually have to make a stark decision: either throw myself into the serious business of fighting oppression, or turn my back on my principles and content myself with making things of beauty to be ignored or consumed by the very society I wanted to destroy. The first option felt morally sound but required a profound sacrifice; the second felt seductive but hollow. From what I saw of my political comrades, the revolution allowed no room for sleeping or doing dishes, much less spending hours alone considering the play of light and color. I knew something in me would die if I let the mechanics of activism grind away the parts of me that didn’t fit its logic. My artist friends, meanwhile, often seemed apathetic; artists have been complicit in the gentrification of every city I’ve called home. (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Volume 1
By necessity, ATU’s work often centers around talking to tenants about their “rights” as given to them by the legal system. In our organizing, these rights are referred to as the shield. A shield can protect you, but it cannot win a fight for you. Your rights often can only protect you if you have access to a lawyer, and can fail you on a judge’s whim. You need something more—you need the sword. We offer this zine in hopes that the tools within will help folks to go on the offensive and fight back against their landlords. Because even when the law and the courts ul mately work to serve the landlord class, the power of tenants united will prevail. When we fight, we win. We cannot stress enough that this zine is incomplete. Only you can finish the story. This is because no tactic is effective without a strategy, and a strategy is not something we can offer. You must determi... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Turning Up the Stones A Reply to Clark's October 13 Message Murray Bookchin The May 5th Group's posting on this list (June 13, 1998), and the various subsequent exchanges, have finally led John Clark to attack me and my views with his by-now-typical malevolence (October 13, 1998; at this writing Clark's posting does not appear on the RA List archives). I am only too delighted to have this opportunity, once and for all, to expose his ongoing campaign to defame me. Virtually unrestrained by moral standards, Clark has an indefatigable capacity to slander a critic and distort his or her views, through outrageous gossip, surreptitious character assassination, and falsification. I have had enough of it, and it is time to turn up the stones and reveal the filth in which he has immersed himself and examine his fury against me and my ideas (many of which he has actually hijacked from me, in warped form, over the course of nearly two decades o... (From : Anarchy Archives.)

This article appeared with the following introduction when it appeared in 1920: “Mühsam is one of the best-known militants and publicists of German anarchism. At present, he is, along with Tom Weinbull, imprisoned in Augsbach Prison. We have learned that both of them, along with other political prisoners, have decided to protest against the ill treatment they have suffered by a hunger strike. It is through acts of this kind that one can appreciate the benefits of the German “revolution.” Mühsam’s joining the Communist Party is similar to that of the Feundlers, the free Dutch partisans (representatives of the Christian revolutionary movement), who have also entered the communist movement. We are witnessing the same events everywhere: whatever the philosophical differences professed by the militants, revolutionary contingents are coming together to form a “united front” against the bourgeoisie and oppo... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Another comrade contributes the following remarks, treating the same subject. Communist Anarchism implies a change in the mental attitude of men towards things as well as towards one another, a change which will necessarily bring with it a change of outward conditions. It implies the disappearance of the idea of ownership. Property as it exists at present is a claim to the absolute ownership of things put forward by an individual of an association and acknowledged by society. Lately we have seen this claim disputed with regard to land. When Lady Matheson says of her estate in the Highlands shall I not do what I will with mine own? there is a general and growing feeling that the claim of any individual to hold land in such a fashion is outrageous. This woman is not using the land. She only demands that we shall all help her to prevent any one else from using it, a claim contrary to common sense, when people are starving for want of what she does... (From : AnarchyArchives.)

(1864 - 1943) ~ German-American Anarchist Revolutionary and Mother Earth Editor
Max Baginski (1864 – November 24, 1943) was a German-American anarchist revolutionary. Baginski was born in 1864 in Bartenstein (now Bartoszyce), a small East Prussian town. His father was a shoemaker who had been active in the 1848 revolution and was thus shunned by the conservative inhabitants of the village. Under his fathers influence, Baginski read freethinker August Specht's writings and Berliner Freie Presse, Johann Most's newspaper, in his youth. After school Baginski became his father's apprentice. Already a staunch socialist, Baginski moved to Berlin in 1882. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1893. (Source: Wikipedia.org) Rocker thought Baginski was "one of the most outstanding human beings I have met in my life." This Rocker's obituary for Baginski a prolific anarchist writer and activist. I. On 24 November 1943, Max Baginski died at Bellevue Hospital in New York at the age of 79. With his passing, the world lost one of th... (From : Wikipedia.org / LibCom.org.)

(1950 - )
Agustín Guillamón Iborra , born in Barcelona in 1950 , is a historian of the revolutionary workers movement and of the Spanish War and Revolution of 1936. (From : Wikipedia.org.)

National University of Ireland, Galway | NUI Galway · School of Education.

(1934 - 1999)
George Molnar (1934 – 1999) was a Hungarian-born philosopher whose principal area of interest was metaphysics. He worked mainly in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney but resided in England in 1976–1982. He published four philosophical papers in two separate spells; the first two in the 1960s and the second two after a return to the profession in the 1990s. His book Powers: A Study in Metaphysics was published posthumously in 2003. A mini memoir Remembering George Molnar; politics and passions of a Sydney philosopher, edited by Molnar's longtime companion, Carlotta McIntosh, was published by Beaujon Press in 2019. (From : Wikipedia.org.)

Kewanee, Ill., Oct. 2. The funeral of the victims of the tragedy of the Markham home Saturday, in which eight lives were taken by the mother’s insane act, was held today. Only two coffins were used, one for Mrs Markham and the other for the seven children she killed, whose charred bodies were taken from the ashes of the home. Who can tell the amount of pent-up woe the above brief telegram contains? Here was a young woman of thirty-five years who had given birth to seven children, the eldest one eleven years, the youngest four months old. There was no “race suicide” in that house. The father, we are informed, was a poor truck-farmer in summer and did odd jobs in winter for an existence. The father, on learning of the awful deed, committed suicide on the spot! So the entire family of eight are gone. The first dispatches inform us that Mrs Markham had become despondent over family cares and the loneliness of farm life. (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

FdCA Gender Commission Statement
We are witnessing the preparations for a clear and determined attack on the freedom and self-determination of the women who live in this country, an attack which is aimed at several fronts but which has the sole objective of reducing the public voice and presence of women. One of the prime areas where women’s freedom is worse threatened is in regard to sexuality, with the ongoing demonization of free and responsible sexuality with regard to contraceptives and to the use of Law 194 of 1978 concerning voluntary abortions. Always foremost in the minds of the Right and the Catholic church, this attack on women’s freedom to responsibly and autonomously manage their relationships and their sexuality is now at the center of a mad rush to gain control of public funds in order to ensure that the private clinics, financed by our money, are run according to the demands of the church and a certain political ideology, yet another attack on the public healthcare syst... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Feminism Is For Everybody by Bell Hooks, South End Press, 2000
bell hooks is one of the most prominent and well respected feminist academics and authors in the United States. She is often the subject of study by college students and academics, as well as a frequent guest on talk shows and other mass media. Her work in feminist theory has been groundbreaking, yet it is often limited to academic, literary, and other elite circles. Feminism Is For Everybody is hooks’ attempt to create a quick, simple primer on feminist history, theory, and politics to the masses who receive a misinformed, misunderstood, and maligned version of feminist movement. To that end, she has written an easy to read, concise book which documents her experiences as a feminist activist and academic. As an anarchist with some exposure to hooks’ writings, I have a great deal of respect for her. This was once again reinforced by the content of Feminism Is For Everybody. Whether hooks identifies herself as an anarchist or not, much of what I found in the boo... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Wednesday Night [Paris, Jan. 1, 1794]. As I have been, you tell me, three days without writing, I ought not to complain of two: yet, as I expected to receive a letter this afternoon, I am hurt; and why should I, by concealing it, affect the heroism I do not feel? I hate commerce. How differently must ——’s head and heart be organized from mine! You will tell me, that exertions are necessary: I am weary of them! The face of things, public and private, vexes me. The “peace” and clemency which seemed to be dawning a few days ago, disappear again. “I am fallen,” as Milton said, “on evil days;” for I really believe that Europe will be in a state of convulsion, during half a century at least. Life is but a labor of patience: it is always rolling a great stone up a hill; for, before a person can find a resting-place, imagining it is lodged, down it comes again, and all the work is to be done...

THE popular notion about marriage and love is that they are synonymous, that they spring from the same motives, and cover the same human needs. Like most popular notions this also rests not on actual facts, but on superstition. Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention. There are to-day large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it. On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from mar... (From : Anarchy Archives.)