Organise!No.66 - Spring 2006 | £1.50 - €2.50 | Free to Prisoners for REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHISM
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www.afed.org.uk Organise!No.66 - Spring 2006 | £1.50 - €2.50 | Free to prisoners FOR REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHISM Defending anonymity “...anyone concerned about threats toPage our freedomseven. should be worried by the Identity Cards Act.” Also inside: Rossport solidarity camp A village’s fight against Shell on Ireland’s west coast. A different kind of media attention From G8 protests to Peter Stringfellow: how anarchists are being courted by the media. Organise! Anarchist Federation local groups and contacts Organise is the magazine of the Hereford Leicester, LE1 1WB Surrey, GU21 2XL Anarchist Federation (AF). It is AF-IAF Hereford, c/o BM [email protected] [email protected] published in order to develop ANARFED, London, WC1N www.geocities.com/leicester_af anarchist communist ideas. It 3XX Scotland/Alba aims is provide a clear anarchist [email protected] Nottingham [email protected] viewpoint on contemporary AF-IAF Nottingham, c/o The issues and to initiate debate on International of Anarchist Sumac Centre, 245 Gladstone Sheffield ideas not normally covered in Federations, contact for the Street, Nottingham, NG7 6HX [email protected] agitational papers. AF-IAF London, BM [email protected] We aim to produce Organise! ANARFED, London, WC1N West Yorkshire twice a year. To meet this target, 3XX Manchester [email protected] we positively solicit contribu- [email protected] AF-IAF Manchester, c/o 96 tions from our readers. We aim Bold Street, Liverpool, L1 Woking to print any article that furthers Ireland/Eire [email protected] AF-IAF Woking, PO Box 375, the objectives of anarchist AF-IAF Ireland are a part of the www.af-north.org Knaphill, Woking, Surrey, communism. If you’d like to Organise! anarchist organisation GU21 2XL write something for us, but are Organise!, PO Box 505, Belfast, Merseyside unsure whether to do so, why BT12 6BQ AF-IAF Liverpool, c/o 96 Bold Tyneside not get in touch first? Even [email protected] Street, Liverpool, L1 AF-IAF Tyneside, PO Box 1TA, articles that are 100% in www.organiseireland.org [email protected] Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE99 agreement with our aims and 1TA8, [email protected] principles can leave much open London (and all other areas) Organise! editors to debate. AF-IAF London, BM Organise, AF-IAF London, BM Wales/Cymru As always, the articles in this ANARFED, London, WC1N ANARFED, London, WC1N c/o BM ANARFED, London, issue do not necessarily repre- 3XX 3XX WC1N 3XX sent the collective viewpoint of [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] the AF. We hope that their publication will produce Leicester Resistance editors The Anarchist Federation is a responces from readers and spur AF-IAF Leicester, c/o Frontline Resistance, AF-IAF South East, member of the International of the debate on. Books, 73 Humberstone Gate, PO Box 375, Knaphill, Woking, Anarchist Federations iaf-ifa.org The deadline for the next issue of Organise! will be 15th August 2006. Please send all contributions to the address on the left. It would help if all articles could be either typed or on disk (PC or MAC format). Alternatively, articles can be emailed to the editors directly at [email protected]. What goes in Organise! contents Organise! hopes to open up debate in many areas of life. As we have stated before, unless 03 - Editorial influence? signed by the Anarchist Federa- tion as a whole or by a local AF 04 - Venezuela 2006: anarchism 20 - The struggle against moun- group, articles in Organise! against all odds tain top removal in Appalachia reflect the views of the person 05 - Empowering prisoners 23 - Ramón Acín Aquilué who has written the articles and nobody else. through contact 24 - Reviews and obituaries If the contents of one of the 07 - Fighting Labour's Identity 26 - Revolutionary portraits: articles in this issue provokes thought, makes you angry, Card and database plans Tom Bell and Louisa Sarah compels a response then let us 10 - Rossport solidarity camp Bevington know. Revolutionary ideas 12 - A new world in our hearts 28 - Aims and principles of the develop from debate, they do not merely drop out of the air! 16 - How do anarchists gain Anarchist Federation editorial 3 The Anarchist Federation is now in its 20th as before under the right-wing. At govern- and spectacular stunts. As the state gets year and we are especially pleased to bring ment level, money always talks, whatever more oppressive, neither must we forget the you the first of this year's Organise! the colour of the flag. prisoners who are fighting the system from magazine. Thanks to all those who have In Britain, as western warmongering within their cages, and we print an impas- read and contributed to the paper, and continues in the Middle East, our freedom sioned call for more prisoner support. supported the press fund. to speak out and act against our increas- As we write this editorial, widespread The end of our second decade coincides ingly authoritarian state has been weakened protests and other anti-government activites with a number of other important anniver- by new laws, bans, and the looming threat have continued in France against the saries: the General Strike in Britain 1926, of a national identity scheme. Anarchists 'Anglo-Saxon' (read Thatcherite) austerity the high point of the Spanish Revolution in need to do more to help make the ID measures which are threatening the liveli- 1936 and the Hungarian Revolution against scheme into Labour's 'Poll Tax', and to this hoods of young workers, now the govern- the 'Soviet' invasion of 1956. We will keep end we provide both analysis and some ment has proposed to allow companies to the full celebrations for next issue with thoughts for action. Likely imposition of articles on Hungary and the General Strike. more nuclear power and weapons will sack you after 2 years for no reason, if you For this issue we offer a piece about the require additional efforts by our movement, are under 26. The fight is on within Europe legacy of Spain in the 1930s, one of the and this is sure to be a newsworthy issue in to protect past gains, whilst we must ensure most important examples of the influence of the coming year. But as our article on the solidarity with migrant workers who are anarchist ideas and action in living memory. media and academia will assert, we will being exploited by the current economic We also provide a host of revolutionary have to be careful not to be sucked into system, and highlight the class war over portraits, pamphlet reviews and sadly, struggling through second-hand propaganda dangerous racist and religious diversions. further obituaries, of both lesser and more well-known anarchist lives. But Organise! is not only about the old - in this issue we report and analyse a vibrant community campaign against a oil pipeline in Rossport on the West coast of Ireland, and interview an IWW member about opposition to 'mountain top removal' strip- mining in West Virginia, USA. We also reproduce an interview with the Venezuelan anarchists who are attempting to come to terms with the Chavez 'revolution' which is becoming more and more statist and militaristic by the minute. There too, indigenous communities are coming to further realise the reality of state depen- dence on the profits of powerful multina- tional mining companies like Anglo- Amercian (Tarmac in UK). This environ- mental destruction is being continued and A mass meeting of anarchists and socialists in revolutionary Barcelona. This promoted by the leftist Chavista regime just year marks the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish revolution. Subscribe Name to Organise! Address (Tick as appropriate): I enclose £4 for a two issue sub or £8 for a two-issue supporting sub (add 25% for overseas or institutions). Please return to Organise! I enclose £4 to pay for a prisoner's subscription. address on page two I enclose £6 for a joint subscription to Organise! and Resistance. venezuela 4 venezuela 2006: anarchism against all odds By Comisión de Relaciones Anarquistas (CRA), Venezuela “Our friends from abroad continuously ask us to explain our to dismantle this farce. It hasn’t been easy views about the current situation in Venezuela. This reply is to uphold this position that smashes the simplistic schemes that have led the Latin- based on two* recent texts by the editing team of El Libertario, American left from failure to failure for already published in their entirety in the internet (in Spanish), over 80 years, and multiplying our efforts to and from which we extract our main points.” Talking about the keep our position has been the order of the Venezuelan situation, from an interview with La Rosa Negra – day, but our consistency begins to produce counterinfo from Mexico in January 2006. results, undoubtedly modest but full of hope that fall within the renewed activity and presence of anarchism in South America, RN: We know that you fight in three tion that could rightfully vote by virtue of still a minority political expression but one fronts: a) against pseudo-leftist being Venezuelan citizens and having the that has made advances between the decade Chavista groups in power; b) against age to vote, has been the norm in all of the 90’s and today that are, quantitatively the anti-Chavez opposition directed by elections in this country since 1989, even and qualitatively speaking, very important the social democrats and the right; and during the referendum to recall the presi- compared to what happened during the five c) against groups or parties of the dent in 2004, when the gangs from the or six previous decades.