The expansion of the US attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan is not due to the personal qualities of Obama but to the social system he serves: the national state and the capitalist economy. The nature of the situation guarantees that the system will act irrationally. Anarchists should participate in building a broad movement against the war, while raising our political program.

In discussing President Obama’s expansion of the US attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is important not to focus on Obama as a personality but on the social system to which he is commited, specifically to the war-waging capitalist national state. “War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne declared during World War I. It is what the national state is for, what it does, and why it still exists, despite the real trends toward international unity and worldwide coordination. In an age of nuclear bombs, the human race will not be safe until we abolish these states (especially the big, imperial, ones such as those of North America, Western Europe, and Japan) and replace them with a federation of self-managing associations of working people.

[Nederlands]

Anarchism can learn a lot from the feminist movement. In many respects it already has. Anarcha-feminists have developed analyses of patriarchy that link it to the state form. We have learned that no revolutionary project can be complete while men systematically dominate and exploit women; that socialism is a rather empty goal if men's domination of women is left intact.

This essay argues that anarchists can likewise learn from the theory of "intersectionality" that emerged from the feminist movement. Indeed, anarchist conceptions of class struggle have widened as a result of the rise of feminist movements, civil rights movements, gay and lesbian liberation movements, etc. But how do we position ourselves regarding those struggles? What is their relationship to the class struggle? Do we dismiss them as "mere identity politics"?

[Polski]

Jamás he sido muy bueno para las matemáticas, pero el siguiente cálculo es bastante sencillo: súmense 10.000 nuevas tropas a Afganistán, sistemáticas violaciones en las ocupaciones de este país y de Irak, silencio cómplice ante dos genocidios, uno en Gaza, el otro en Sri Lanka (donde aún hay 300.000 seres humanos en campos de concentración), un golpe de Estado en Honduras donde la participación norteamericana ha sido un secreto a voces (aunque les haya salido el tiro por la culata), siete nuevas bases militares en Colombia y ¿qué tenemos de resultado? Un premio Nóbel de la “Paz” para el presidente de EEUU, Barack Obama.

En realidad, no me quita el sueño lo que hagan o dejen de hacer con un premio que vale bien poco, y que el único mérito que cuenta para obtenerlo es el cálculo político. Es verdad que este premio lo han recibido gentes de indudable valor como Pérez Esquivel, Rigoberta Menchú, Martin Luther King o Desmond Tutu. Pero estos casos en verdad son más bien excepcionales...

[Português]

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.

Transfeminism developed out of a critique of the mainstream and radical feminist movements. The feminist movement has a history of internal hierarchies. There are many examples of women of color, working class women, lesbians and others speaking out against the tendency of the white, affluent- dominated women’s movement to silence them and overlook their needs. Instead of honoring these marginalized voices, the mainstream feminist movement has prioritized struggling for rights primarily in the interests of white affluent women.

While the feminist movement as a whole has not resolved these hierarchal tendencies, various groups have continued to speak up regarding their own marginalization – in particular, transgendered women. The process of developing a broader understanding of systems of oppression and how they interact has advanced feminism and is key to building on the theory of anarchist feminism.