Officials calling for calm can offer no rational justification for Gray's death, and so they appeal for order. ... read full story / add a comment

To the memory of Stepan Shaumyan, Armenian Bolshevik leader of the Baku Commune in 1918, and of Hrant Dink, Armenian socialist intellectual from Istanbul who, until his assassination in 2007, exerted a Herculean effort to bring the genocide into the centre of attention in Turkey. ... read full story / add a comment

In the night between April 18th and April 19th a boat filled with up to 950 migrants sank in the Mediterranean Sea, 70 miles north of Libya, while trying to reach the southern European border. This was not only the greatest tragedy to date involving migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, it is also the last of a long series of deaths: around 14,600 from 1993 to November, 2012; 900 in little more than a year from January, 2014 to April, 2015, before this latest tragedy. ... read full story / add a comment

In the open­ing salvos of Latin America’s uneven lurch to the Left in the early twenty-first cen­tury, Bolivia dis­tin­guished itself as the region’s most rad­i­cal socio-political ter­rain.1 Left-indigenous move­ments in the coun­try­side and cityscapes alike threw the state into cri­sis and brought two suc­ces­sive neolib­eral pres­i­dents to their knees – Gon­zalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003, and Car­los Mesa in 2005.2 Evo Morales’s party, the Movimiento al Social­ismo (Move­ment Towards Social­ism, MAS), leapt into the power vac­uum opened up by this series of revolts, and there has been seri­ous debate on the Left as to how best to but­ton down the cen­tral polit­i­cal dynamic of the coun­try ever since. In a coun­try where 62 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion self-identified as indige­nous in the 2001 cen­sus, Morales became the first indige­nous pres­i­dent through the Decem­ber 2005 elec­tions with 54 per­cent of the pop­u­lar vote, assum­ing office in Jan­u­ary 2006. He repeated this extra­or­di­nary elec­toral suc­cess in Decem­ber 2009, with 64 per­cent, and again in Octo­ber 2014, with 61 percent. ... read full story / add a comment

The Thembelihle Crisis Committee, the United Front (UF), the Right to Know (R2K) Campaign and the Democratic Left Front call on all people of good conscience in South Africa to endorse the call for an end to the security siege of Thembelihle. Since the 25th of February 2015, Thembelihle has faced a de facto State of Emergency at the hands of the South African Police Services (SAPS) and other security agents. This undeclared, unofficial State of Emergency in Thembelihle is an attack on all our constitutionally guaranteed rights to and freedoms to organise, associate and freely express ourselves. We call for urgent action to put pressure on the SAPS to end the siege. We call for the creation of conducive conditions for free, open and democratic political activity in which the people of Thembelihle may express and exercise their right to protest, and have their demands for a decent life of dignity met.
... read full story / add a comment

Hundreds of thousands of chiefly white middle class protesters took to the streets in Brazil on 15 March in an organized upsurge of hatred against the federal administration led by President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT). These protests are far more cohesive and better organized than the previous wave of anti-government demonstrations, in 2013; their demands are unambiguously reactionary, and they include primarily the country's elite. ... read full story / add a comment

Over four years since mass uprisings ousted sclerotic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, it can seem that the initial hopes represented by these movements lie in tatters. Libya, Syria, Yemen and Iraq remain mired in bloody armed conflicts that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more within and across borders. In the pivotal case of Egypt, military rule has returned through the violent crushing of protests, the arrests of an estimated 40,000 people and the rebuilding of the repressive structures of the [Hosni] Mubarak era. Elsewhere, autocratic governments look more secure in their rule today than they have for many years. ... read full story / add a comment

“One must know how to employ the kairos [right or opportune moment] of one's forces at the right moment.
It is easy to only lose a little, if one always keeps foremost in the mind the idea that unity is never the trick, but the game.”

— Guy Gebord, “Notes on poker.” ... read full story / add a comment

I personally make just over $17 an hour, while the average wage of a plow driver is $38,000 a year. And yet you have made it clear that you will not tax the wealthy (like yourself) who can afford it to cover the budget gap which you created. But I do not expect you to necessarily understand the hardships you are asking us to suffer, as I am told you are personally worth ten million dollars. Maybe you don’t understand that taking $36 a paycheck out of my wages (which on average you are proposing for all plow drivers) is the difference between making or missing a mortgage payment, a utility bill, or buying a pair of shoes for the kids. Maybe you cannot understand. ... read full story / add a comment

The US troop surges inspire an anarchist to another kind of surge. ... read full story / add a comment

Athens’ decision to accept a eurozone loan extension shows the troika did not really want to negotiate with Syriza - it wanted capitulation. ... read full story / add a comment

On January 25th, Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) formed a government in Greece with the help of the ANEL (Independent Greeks). Within 24 hours direct attacks, threats and provocations aimed at the Greek government, about to begin negotiations with EU and Eurozone leaders, began. The attacks were pre-emptive strikes against efforts to find a quick, viable and productive solution to the Greek debt problem that continues to strangle the Greek economy and society; time is very short and everyone is aware that it is working against the efforts of the Greek government that needs to reach an agreement by February 16 or February 28 at the latest. ... read full story / add a comment

A press report in 1983 that a popular uprising in Upper Volta, a small and poor land-locked country in Western Africa had led to an obscure, but charismatic army officer becoming head of state was truly inspiring news for all those looking for some kind of breakthrough against imperialism in that part of the world. It had come after the depressing news that Margaret Thatcher's Britain had defeated Argentina in the Malvinas and Ronald Reagan's America had crushed Grenada, a clear message to the world that, on a moment's notice, imperialism would brutally crush anything that threatened its power. But because the American empire had been taken by surprise by the Cuban revolution twenty-four years earlier, many of us were then hopeful that maybe we were witnessing such a possibility again, in Africa. ... read full story / add a comment

It was Herald Sun cartoonist Mark Knight who tipped me over the edge.

To be fair, he wasn’t wholly responsible. If it wasn’t for all the lunacy that preceded him, I probably would have dismissed his cartoon as just another Herald Sun atrocity, more a piece of Murdoch-madness to be mocked rather than trigger for outrage. But context is everything. And after days of sanctimonious blather about freedom of speech and the Enlightenment values of Western civilisation, his was one pencil-warfare cartoon too many. ... read full story / add a comment

It's as if no one in any Western country has ever gone berserk with a gun in a public place before. ... read full story / add a comment

On Wednesday morning, the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo was attacked by three masked gunmen, armed with kalashnikovs, who stormed the building and killed ten of its staff and two police officers. The gunmen are currently understood to be Muslim extremists. This attack came minutes after the paper tweeted this drawing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. ... read full story / add a comment

NOTE by Lucien van der Walt: English translation by Nestor McNab of three parts of the historical memoirs of I. U. Parrini – one of the initiators of the anarchist movement in Italy and Egypt, from the days of the First International – which were published in Italian in “La Protesta Umana” of San Francisco, nos. 36, 38 and 40 (21 Nov. and 26 Dec. 1903, and 9 Jan. 1904 respectively). This material is provided for purposes of historical recovery: it must be noted that Parrini was (according to Tony Gorman's 2010 overview of Egyptian anarchism) a "staunch anti-organisationalist, ... notorious for his uncompromising style and ... a persistent obstacle to greater cooperation among anarchists. Not until after his death in 1906 was a national program of action agreed which provided a solid basis for collaboration within the Egyptian movement." His current was in constant conflict with the growing, eventually ascendant, anarcho-syndicalists. Nonetheless, these memoirs -- despite their polemical quality and imbalances -- are a valuable testimony, deserving of wider circulation, not least for their insider view, from the perspective of one current in the movement.

The material is sourced from Leonardo Bettini, "Bibliografia dell'anarchismo, volume 2, tomo 2: periodici e numeri unici anarchici in lingua italiana pubblicati all'estero (1872-1971)" (CP editrice, Firenze, 1976), translation by Nestor McNab. Via Lucien van der Walt. ... read full story / add a comment

Many journalists at the offices of Charlie Hebdo have been murdered by bampots brandishing what appear to be machine guns at close range. It is too soon to have a complete, coherent political narrative of these killings. All one can have at this point are the correct but platitudinous points about there being no justification for this, that all attacks on journalists are abhorrent, that freedom of speech must be defended to the last drop of blood, and so on. If you really need that sermon, you’re in the wrong place. ... read full story / add a comment

The text “In Rojava: People’s War is not Class War”, which you can read below, represents a contribution of the “Internationalist Communist Tendency” (ICT) to a debate that has been taking place in certain circles claiming “anti-capitalist struggle” since several weeks. The central points of this discussion are current events in Western Kurdistan - Rojava. ... read full story / add a comment

Some NGOs with no membership that cast themselves as "radical" misuse grassroots organisations for their own purposes, writes Ayanda Kota. ... read full story / add a comment