Revolt Library : Revolutionary Materials from the Past

Source: “The Worker’s Share of Art,” Commonweal, Vol I, No. 3, April 1885, pp. 18-19; Transcribed: by Ted Crawford. I can imagine some of our comrades smiling bitterly at the above title, and wondering what a Socialist journal can have to do with art; so I begin by saying that I understand only too thoroughly how ‘unpractical’ the subject is while the present system of capital and wages last. Indeed that is my text. What, however, is art? whence does it spring? Art is man’s embodied expression of interest in the life of man; it springs from man’s pleasure in his life; pleasure we must call it, taking all human life together, however much it may be broken by the grief and trouble of individuals; and as it is the expression of pleasure in life generally, in the memory of the deeds of the past, and the hope of those of the future, so it is especially the expression of man’s pleasure in the deeds of... (From : Marxists.org.)

As the effects of the toppling of the Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill continue to ripple out, we’ve obtained two narratives of the night’s events. The first statement is from Maya Little, the Black graduate student who helped catalyze the revolt against the statue by participating in a sit-in against it and then, when that did not succeed, dousing it in paint and her own blood. The second is from another anonymous anarchist, who connects the victory in Chapel Hill with the events of “All Out August,” a month of resistance to fascism, prisons, police, and other manifestations of white supremacy and oppression. Whose Streets? A Statement from Maya Little On Monday night, August 20, 2018, students, workers, neighbors, and comrades reclaimed Chapel Hill in an ungovernable enactment of justice. We marched in our streets and the badged and unbadged racists moved out of the way. We looked out for ea... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The history of the struggles that won the present type of suffrage in Belgium is interesting and very instructive. It shows how, through vigor and constancy associated with caution, a popular party managed, in the space of a few years, to bring a selfish, arrogant class to surrender, even though that class was determined to resist every concession and could call upon the economic and military might of the entire nation in the defense of its privileges. And this history might serve as an example for further struggles targeting much more effective gains for the good of the people. Avanti! has received from its Belgian correspondent (A. Dewinne) an account of those events, which we know to be truthful. We think it might be useful to reprint it here, summarizing some points for reasons of space, after which we shall offer our own observations. From 1831 to 1893, Belgium had an electoral arrangement referred to as census suffrage. In order to... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

AN ACCOUNT OF THE SEMINARY That will be opened On Monday the Fourth Day of AUGUST, At EPSOM in SURREY, For the INSTRUCTION of TWELVE PUPILS IN The GREEK, LATIN, FRENCH, and ENGLISH Languages. LONDON: Printed for T.CADELL, in the Strand. M.DCC.LXXXIII. Of whom information respecting other particulars may be received. AN ACCOUNT OF THE SEMINARY, &c. THE two principal objects of human power are government and education. They have accordingly engrossed a very large share in the disquisitions of the speculative in all ages. The subject of the former indeed is man, already endowed with his greatest force of body, and arrived at the exercise of his intellectual powers: the subject of the latter is man, as yet shut up in the feebleness of childhood, and the imbecility of inexperience. Civil society is great and unlimited in its exten... (From : Anarchy Archives.)

Written: July 1918 (in Breslau Prison). First Published: Vladimir Korolenko’s autobiographical novel A History of My Contemporary (pages 11-53). Berlin, 1919. Luxemburg had translated this work from the Russian into German, and wrote the following text as an introduction. Source: International Socialist Review, Vol.30 No.1, January-February 1969, pp.11-31. Translated: from the German by Frieda Mattick in New Essays: A Quarterly Devoted to the Study of Modern Society, Winter 1943. Transcription/Markup: Einde O’Callaghan, Daniel Gaido, & Brian Baggins Public Domain: Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. This work is completely free. I “My soul, of a threefold nationality, has at last found a home – and this above all in the literature of Russia,” Korolenko says in his memoirs. This literature, which to Korolenko was fatherland, home, and nat... (From : Marxists.org.)

(1530 - 1563)
• "It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they were born."
• "When the people lose their liberty through deceit they are not so often betrayed by others as misled by themselves."
• "...the essential reason why men take orders willingly is that they are born serfs and are reared as such. From this cause there follows another result, namely that people easily become cowardly and submissive under tyrants."

(1848 - 1917) ~ Anarchist Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, and Pamphleteer from France : By 1890 his political commitments were clearer: he showed a clear preference for the anarchist left, and became friends with Jean Grave and Camille Pissarro. He wrote at length on Impressionism, believing it to be the beginning of a cultural revolution in France. (From : Sharif Gemie Bio.)
• "The patience of the downtrodden and the dispossessed has lasted long enough. They want to live, they want to enjoy, they want their share of all the happiness and sunshine." (From : "Ravachol," by by Octave Henri Marie Mirbeau.)
• "...each turn of the government machinery grinds the tumbling, gasping flesh of the poor..." (From : "Ravachol," by by Octave Henri Marie Mirbeau.)
• "Capitalism is insatiable, and the wage system compounds the evils of ancient slavery. The shops are packed full of clothing, and there are those who go about completely naked; the indifferent rich are puking up food, while others perish from hunger in their doorways. No cry is heeded: whenever a single, louder complaint penetrates the din of sad murmurs, the Lebels is loaded and the troops are mobilized." (From : "Ravachol," by by Octave Henri Marie Mirbeau.)

(1904 - 1988) ~ French Theorist of Anarcho-Communism, Anti-Fascism, and Anti-Colonialism : ...as Guerin grew older, his politics moved increasingly leftward, leading him later in life to espouse a hybrid of anarchism and marxism. Arguably, his most important book from this period of his life is Anarchism: From Theory to Practice... (From : Faatz Bio.)
• "In general, the bureaucracy of the totalitarian State is unsympathetic to the claims of self-management to autonomy." (From : "Anarchism: From Theory to Practice," by Daniel Gu....)
• "The anarchist regards the State as the most deadly of the preconceptions which have blinded men through the ages." (From : "Anarchism: From Theory to Practice," by Daniel Gu....)
• "Because anarchism is constructive, anarchist theory emphatically rejects the charge of utopianism. It uses the historical method in an attempt to prove that the society of the future is not an anarchist invention, but the actual product of the hidden effects of past events." (From : "Anarchism: From Theory to Practice," by Daniel Gu....)

(1951 - )
Carl Levy is professor of politics at Goldsmith's College, University of London. He is a specialist in the history of modern Italy and the theory and history of anarchism. (From : Wikipedia.org.)

Little biographical information is available for Samuel Polinow, but most of what we have comes in the form of unfavorable remarks. Remembered by contemporary anarchists as “a bit of a screwball –an anarcho-moron” who drank excessively, Polinow was a regular contributor of essays and short fiction to the anarchist periodicals Road to Freedom and Man! between 1926 and 1940. The remainder of this piece has been left out to spare the reader some clumsy and corny flourishes; even the portion presented here required editing for clarity. See Avrich, Anarchist Voices, pp 420, 433. The name Max Polinoff, perhaps a brother of Samuel’s, appears as the informant on Weinberg’s certificate of death in 1939 (see Chapter 1, note 1). We seem to find this man in 1930, spelled Polinofsky, living at 2930 N Arizona Street in Philadelphia. This cigar factory worker and his wife Lena were 36, having come from Russia in 1904 and 1913 respectively. Their children Ruth, Georg... (From : "Forty Years in the Struggle: The Memoirs of a Jew....)

Tuesday Morning. I seize this opportunity to inform you, that I am to set out on Thursday with Mr. ———, and hope to tell you soon (on your lips) how glad I shall be to see you. I have just got my passport, so I do not foresee any impediment to my reaching H——, to bid you good-night next Friday in my new apartment—where I am to meet you and love, in spite of care, to smile me to sleep—for I have not caught much rest since we parted. You have, by your tenderness and worth, twisted yourself more artfully round my heart, than I supposed possible.—Let me indulge the thought, that I have thrown out some tendrils to cling to the elm by which I wish to be supported.—This is talking a new language for me!—But, knowing that I am not a parasite-plant, I am willing to receive the proofs of affection, that every pulse replies to, when I think of being once more in the same house with you.&m...

Our reformers have suddenly made a great discovery--the white slave traffic. The papers are full of these "unheard-of conditions," and lawmakers are already planning a new set of laws to check the horror. It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from a great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency, gambling, saloons, etc. And what is the result of such crusades? Gambling is increasing, saloons are doing a lively business through back entrances, prostitution is at its height, and the system of pimps and cadets is but aggravated. How is it that an institution, known almost to every child, should have been discovered so suddenly? How is it that this evil, known to all sociologists, should now be made such an important issue? To assume that the recent investigation of the white slave traffic (and, by the way, a very superficial investigation) has discovered anything new, is, to say the least, very foolish. Pros... (From : Anarchy Archives.)

Night in a prison cell! A chair, a bed, a small washstand, four blank walls, ghastly in the dim light from the corridor without, a narrow window, barred and sunken in the stone, a grated door! Beyond its hideous iron latticework, within the ghastly walls, -a man! An old man, gray-haired and wrinkled, lame and suffering. There he sits, in his great loneliness, shut in front all the earth. There he walks, to and fro, within his measured space, apart from all he loves! 'There, for every night in five long years to come, he will walk alone, while the white age-flakes drop upon his head, while the last years of the winter of life gather and pass, and his body draws near the ashes. Every night, for five long years to come, he will sit alone, this chattel slave, whose hard toll is taken by the State, -and without recompense save that the Southern planter gave his Negroes, -every night he will sit there so within those four white walls. Every night, for five long years to... (From : Anarchy Archives.)

No one at all capable of an intense conscious inner life need ever hope to escape mental anguish and suffering. Sorrow and often despair over the so-called eternal fitness of things are the most persistent companions of our life. But they do not come upon us from the outside, through the evil deeds of particularly evil people. They are conditioned in our very being; indeed, they are interwoven through a thousand tender and coarse threads with our existence. It is absolutely necessary that we realize this fact, because people who never get away from the notion that their misfortune is due to the wickedness of their fellows never can outgrow the petty hatred and malice which constantly blames, condemns, and hounds others for something that is inevitable as part of themselves. Such people will not rise to the lofty heights of the true humanitarian to whom good and evil, moral and immoral, are but limited terms for the inner play of human emotions upon the human sea o... (From : Anarchy Archives.)

To the Editor of The Open Court: Possessed of rather more than ordinary interest in the sex question, and agreeing with Professor Cope that any proposition for the amelioration of the condition of women should be discussed and decided by women, I am moved to certain remarks suggested by his article on “The Material Relations of Sex” in the first number of The Monist. All through its perusal I was impressed by his unconscious recognition of an underlying question, which, apart from woman’s inferiority, determines the relations of the sexes. This is plainly apparent in the paragraph alluding to the communistic system of wealth production and distribution, in which he admits the possibility of promiscuous sex-relations. While I agree with Professor Cope that to institute communism would be a decided blow at progress, since progress consists in a constant widening of individual liberty while communism invokes authoritarian d... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)