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The Anarchist Communist World Anarchist Federation local groups and contacts Organise! England (and all general enquires) Organise! editors The magazine of the BM ANARFED, London, WC1N 3XX, Organise!, BM ANARFED, London, Anarchist Federation England, UK WC1N 3XX [email protected] [email protected] Issue 80 - Summer 2013 http://www.afed.org.uk Resistance editors Organise! is the magazine of the Anarchist Bristol AF Resistance, BM ANARFED, London, Federation (AF). It is published in order to [email protected] WC1N 3XX develop anarchist communist ideas. It aims http://bristolaf.wordpress.com/ [email protected] to provide a clear anarchist viewpoint on contemporary issues and to initiate debate Lancashire Sheffield AF on ideas not normally covered in agitational papers. [email protected] [email protected] We aim to produce Organise! twice a year. http://yorks-afed.org To meet this target, we positively solicit con- Leicester AF http://thefargatespeaker.wordpress. tributions from our readers. We aim to print [email protected] com/ any article that furthers the objectives of http://leicesteraf.afed.org.uk anarchist communism. If you’d like to write Surrey and Hants AF something for us, but are unsure whether Leeds AF [email protected] to do so, why not get in touch first? Even [email protected] articles that are 100% in agreement with our http://yorks-afed.org aims and principles can leave much open to debate. Scotland/Alba As always, the articles in this issue do not Lincoln AF [email protected] necessarily represent the collective view- [email protected] http://scotlandaf.wordpress.com/ point of the AF. We hope that their publica- tion will produce responses from our readers Liverpool AF (including Merseyside) Aberdeen and spur debate on. c/o News From Nowhere Bookshop 96 [email protected] For the next issue of Organise! Please send Bold Street all contributions to the address on the right. Liverpool L1. Dundee It would help if all articles could be either [email protected] [email protected] typed or on disc. Alternatively, articles can be emailed to the editors directly at [email protected] London AF Edinburgh & the Lothians • BM ANARFED, London, WC1N 3XX, [email protected] England, UK http://edinburghanarchists.noflag.org. What goes in Organise! [email protected] uk http://aflondon.wordpress.com Organise! hopes to open up debate in many areas of life. As we have stated before, un- Glasgow less signed by the Anarchist Federation as a Manchester AF [email protected] whole or by a local AF group, articles in Or- [email protected] http://glasgow.afed.org.uk ganise! reflect the views of the person who http://www.af-north.org/ has written the article and nobody else. Inverness If the contents of one of the articles in this Newcastle AF (including Tyneside) [email protected] issue provokes thought, makes you angry, Anarchist Federation, PO Box ITA, New- compels a response then let us know. castle Upon Tyne, NE99 1TA Stirling Revolutionary ideas develop from debate, [email protected] [email protected] they do not merely drop out of the air! Nottingham AF (including Notts) Box AF c/o The Sumac Centre Wales/Cymru 245 Gladstone Street Nottingham [email protected] NG7 6HX [email protected] http://www.afed.org.uk/nottingham/ http://nottsblackarrow.wordpress.com Anarchist Communist Editions Organise! Issue 81- Winter 2013 Editorial 4 Organise!, BM ANARFED, Lon- don, WC1N 3XX Utopian? Guilty your honour [email protected] 6 Subscriptions Beyond perfection: What we can learn from science fiction utopias Single issues £3·50 (£4·00 EU / 10 £4·50 rest of world) Anarchism: Utopian or scientific? Annual subscriptions to Organ- 14 ise! (two issues) are available for: Children of the Commune £6·00 UK / £7·00 EU / £8·00 23 rest of world Education in an anarchist society For a joint subscription to Or- 25 ganise! and Resistance £14·00 UK / £22·00 EU / In defence of Malatesta £28·00 rest of world 28 Anarchism and organisation Resistance sub. NB: A year’s 32 sub is 10 issues. £8·00 UK / 15·00 EU / £20·00 Syria: The struggle continues rest of world 35 Cheques or postal orders pay- Statement from the Libertarian Socialist Movement (Egypt) able to ‘AFED’ 39 Ask about discounted bulk or- ders : [email protected] Culture Article: Henri Edmond Cross: Painter of Utopia 40 “I come to you like the beggar man...” A review of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed 42 Review Carlo Tresca: portrait of a rebel. Nunzio Pernicone 43 Review Spanish civil war tour, Barcelona 45 Letters 46 4 Organise! It might seem a bit peculiar to have these hopes now, swept away by the wars, no borders, and no inequal- as one of our main themes the idea greyness of austerity, cuts and the ity, where the fruits of the world are of Utopia, at a time when the situa- growing power of the police state. shared in common and prejudice is a tion both in Britain and around the thing of the past. That is what should world seems in many ways to be at But that is exactly why we have dedi- continue to make us fight on, even its grimmest for many decades. We cated some of this issue to the idea of in grim times. The vision of such a have seen deteriorating economic Utopia. Even in the grimmest times society, a Utopia if you will, should conditions as the ruling class and its we need a vision of What Could Be be seen as a lighthouse sending out governments impose massive auster- to sustain us. This was the outlook of its beams in the darkness. They must ity measures in many countries, we the revolutionary workers movement enthuse us to strive for something have seen increasing moves to States when it emerged in the nineteenth better, and they must be the inspir- increasing their repressive powers in response to people daring to fight back against these attacks. We have seen the rise of far-right and anti-immigrant and anti-minority parties throughout Europe. We have seen increasing racism and Editorial homophobia, with homosexuality What’s in the latest Organise! now criminalised in Russia by the Putin regime, coupled with vicious century. Anarchists and socialists ing vision of more and more of us as attacks on gay people there by fascist regularly referred to a future society, we look for a way out of the social groups. where life had been radically trans- catastrophe that life on this planet formed. We had works like William now seems. We feel that anarchism We have seen the National Health Morris’s News from Nowhere, Oscar can renew itself and once again act Service under increasing attack in Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under as a challenge to the system. As the this country, along with plans to pri- Socialism, and How We Shall Bring song Les Anarchistes by the singer vatise Royal Mail. Along with this are About the Revolution by Pouget Leo Ferré goes, anarchists “Struck so further attacks on the unemployed, and Pataud, as well as The Conquest hard, that they can strike again”. the imposition of the Bedroom Tax of Bread and Fields, Factories and (Poll Tax Mark Two), and mas- Workshops by Kropotkin and Anar- In this issue we talk about the possi- sively rising food and energy prices. chy by Malatesta. bilities of what education could look The increased State surveillance of like in a genuine free society basing our mails and phone calls has been Now all the socialists can offer us is them on social experiments in educa- revealed and the United States is either praise of the market, as with tion in the past and present. We look seen as Spy-Master in Chief, with the social-democrat and Labourite at the field of science fiction, a liter- the British government as a willing parties throughout the world, where ary form often conducive to showing accomplice. it would be difficult to tell the dif- us a different point of view and of ference between their policies and different possibilities. We look at the The Arab Spring itself, which en- outlook and those of the Conserva- work of Henri Edmond Cross, one of thused many, is now turning to an tive, Republican and Christian-Dem- the French post-impressionist paint- Autumn of Repression; the green ocrat outfits; and the small Leninist ers enthused by the anarchist idea, shoots of revolt appear to be turning groups, with their vision of a repeat who sought to represent this new into the brown leaves of repression, of the fiasco in the Soviet Union, society on canvas. We reprint Wayne with the military regime installed where one repressive and autocratic Price’s article on the idea of Utopia in Egypt. Those old revolutionary regime was replaced with another, itself, where he argues strongly for a hopes that re-emerged in the late and which are revealed in their re-affirmation of a Utopian outlook. nineteen sixties and endured for internal practices today- witness the many decades now seem like fool- appalling Gerry Healey, as well as the Also in this issue we look at the ideas ish fantasies. Yes, that period was a SWP. Only the social, class strug- and lives of people who fought hard time of great hope, and Utopia was gle anarchists still offer the hope of to bring about the birth of this new invoked many times, but where are a better world, where there are no society.
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