Jean Weir
Tame Words from a Wild Heart

Words. Mere Words. The pages that follow are in part transcriptions of the spoken word—‘the wonder worker that is no more’, as Emma Goldman wrote wistfully over one hundred years ago when referring to the inadequacy of the spoken word to awaken thought and shake people out of their lethargy. Here in the twenty-first century anarchists no longer talk about spoken propaganda to awaken the masses, bemoaning the absence of orators such as Johann Most or Luigi Galleani. In rare encounters organized by comrades today ‘the masses’ are noticeably absent, they don’t even enter the equation.

Maurice Brinton
The Irrational in Politics Propaganda and policemen, prisons and schools, traditional values and traditional morality all serve to reinforce the power of the few and to convince or coerce the many into acceptance of a brutal, degrading and irrational system.

This pamphlet is an attempt to analyse the various mechanisms whereby modern society manipulates its slaves into accepting their slavery and — at least in the short term — seems to succeed. It does not deal with ‘police’ and ‘jails’ as ordinarily conceived but with those internalised patterns of repression and coercion, and with those intellectual prisons in which the ‘mass individual’ is today entrapped.

Paul Lafargue
The Right To Be Lazy

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.

Otto Rühle
The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism

Now that the tragic history of fascism has run the full course of its formal development, culminating in the modern democratic State, Rühle’s article becomes more readily comprehensible to us. It was written at the end of the thirties and dedicated to the contemporaneous struggle against both bolshevism and fascism. The real dominion of present day capitalism shows the authoritarian designs that have provided the platform for contemporary fascism (camouflaged by democracy), and those of contemporary bolshevism (camouflaged by the dictatorship of the proletariat) to be quite similar.

The struggle against the Cruise missile base in Comiso 1981–83

Comiso in Sicily became a prime place on the NATO nuclear armaments map, having been chosen to house 112 cruise missiles. A prosperous commercial and agricultural centre, it is characterised by poverty and unemployment, a situation that prevails among Sicilian peasants and manual workers. In contrast to what was being said by the Italian government — that the missile base would bring wellbeing and jobs to the area — some local anarchists (comrades in Ragusa and Catania) decided to give a more realistic picture based on the social and economic effects that such a base would have, along with the organisational proposal to form self-managed leagues in all the area, which would coordinate to occupy and destroy the base.

The Unwanted Children of Capital

What is a CPT (the Italian for immigration detention centre)? It is a place where the Italian State locks up all immigrants (children, women and men) who do not have stay permits. It is a modern concentration camp where undesirables are confined before being deported.
Immigration detention centres exist all over fortress Europe, as the bosses establish that only certain immigrants are allowed to stay; the others, those whose face doesn’t fit and cannot be exploited as cheap labour, are locked up in prisons especially created for them and held until they are deported. They are ‘guilty’ of coming from lands where mere surviving is impossible, owing to famine and war, desertification and ecological disasters, industrial reorganisation and mass dismissal.

Alfredo M. Bonanno
Things well done and things done by half

We are not the only ones facing the level of the clash. As anarchists we can have all the illusions we like, illusions of purity and being a voice in the desert, but sooner or later we must concede that we are in company, bad company.

Pierleone Porcu
Third World

The economic and social situation in the countries of the Third World has in no way changed from the beginning of the eighties, in fact it has regressed frighteningly, accentuating the inequality between rich and poor countries more and more.

Max Sartin, Wolfi Landstreicher, Dominique Misein, Adonide
This is What Democracy Looks Like

One would think that a political doctrine and system that was propagated by the bourgeoisie in their rise to power, that is promoted world-wide by the Western ruling class and that has only existed in its so-called “pure” form on the backs of slaves, would at least be suspect in the eyes of those who oppose the present social order. But such is not the case.