The Hackney Liberals have returned Professor Stuart by a sufficiently large majority, and the Liberal press has been engaged in singing the praises of the new member; who it seems is the very pattern of a useful politician and much advanced thinker; this may be, but if a man is to be judged by his utterances we take the liberty of thinking all this jubilant praise a little overdone. If Professor Stuart has very advanced opinions he at least did not venture to put them forward even before such a very Radical constituency as Hackney; in point of fact so-called "fair-trade" and so-called free-trade seem to have been the issues joined at Hackney; and, ably as this subject was treated in JUSTICE in a late number, we may in passing once more call... (From: Marxists.org.)
On the day Peter Avdeev died in the hospital at Vozdvizhensk, his old father with the wife of the brother in whose stead he had enlisted, and that brother's daughter -- who was already approaching womanhood and almost of age to get married -- were threshing oats on the hard-frozen threshing floor.
There had been a heavy fall of snow the previous night followed towards morning by a severe front. The old man woke when the cocks were crowing for the third time, and seeing the bright moonlight through the frozen windowpanes got down from the stove, put on his boots, his sheepskin coat and cap, and went out to the threshing floor. Having worked there for a couple of hours he returned to the hut and awoke his son and the women. When the woman... (From: Wikisource.org.)
One hundred years ago today, a workers’ revolution triumphed in Russia, with consequences that would echo for generations. It was 7 November 1917, which Russia then called 25 October because the Czar was so reactionary he opposed switching from the inaccurate Julian calendar to the more accurate Gregorian one. That day, workers and soldiers under the command of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet (which means “council” in Russian) took control of all important public buildings in Petrograd, the Russian capital, and dismissed the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky. That night, the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets met and proclaimed its power.
The Road to October
The road to the Oc... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
As predictions for the death toll from the Haitian earthquakes rise over 200,000, ABC News have reported that planes carrying medical equipment and relief supplies are having to compete with soldiers for the valuable slots at Port-au-Prince airport which was taken over by the US military after the quake. Since the start of the great anti-slavery republican insurrection nearly 220 years ago, Haiti has been presented as a dangerous place incapable of running its own affairs and requiring foreign intervention. Yet the reality is its people were the first enslaved population to deliver themselves from slavery and also carried out what was only the third successful republican insurrection on the planet. The threat of this good example was rewa... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
“Chaos never died”: Hakim Bey’s Ontology
“Chaos never died”. This is one of the best-known slogans from Hakim Bey’s seminal work, TAZ. In the second of a sixteen-part series, Andrew Robinson reconstructs the ontology of Bey’s “ontological anarchism”. He examines what it means to take chaos as ontologically primary, and how a sense of meaning or order can emerge from chaos.
Chaos Never Died
Bey’s ontology is based on the primacy of chaos. The concept of chaos should not be seen as a synonym for disorder, or an attention-grabbing rephrasing of anarchism. Chaos is not simply the absence of laws or the state. It is an ontological condition characterized by constant flu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The case of the Hammersmith costermongers has already been briefly alluded to in JUSTICE: it is what is commonly called a 'hard case;' a phrase however which means very different things according to the position of those to whom it is applied, meaning to some people the loss of a hundred pounds or so, which everybody can see they ought not to lose, but which loss will only inconvenience them; while to others it means the loss of livelihood; which latter loss is to be dreaded by the Hammersmith costermongers, especially if the other local boards imitate the conduct of the Hammersmith magnates. The facts if the readers have not noticed them are briefly these: the costermongers have been used from time immemorial to hold a curb-stone market in... (From: Marxists.org.)
It would not perhaps be thought, ordinarily, that the man whom physical disabilities have made so helpless that he is unable to move around among his fellows can bear his lot more happily, even though he suffer pain, and face life with a more cheerful and contented spirit, than can the man whose deformities are merely enough to mark him out from the rest of his fellows without preventing him from entering with them into most of their common affairs and experiences. But the fact is that the former's very helplessness makes him content to rest and not to strive. I know a young man so helplessly deformed that he has to be carried about, who is happy in reading a little, playing chess, taking a course or two in college, and all with the sunnies... (From: RaggedEdgemagazine.com.)
Is happiness really possible in a time of ruin? Can we somehow flourish, have complete lives? Is joy any longer compatible with the life of today?
A deep sense of well-being has become an endangered species. How often does one hear “It is good to be here”? (Matthew 17:4, Luke 9:5, Luke 9:33) or Wordsworth’s reference to “the pleasure which there is in life itself”? [1] Much of the prevailing condition and the dilemma it poses is expressed by Adorno’s observation: “A wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”[2]
In this age happiness, if not obsolete, is a test, an opportunity. “To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without being frightened.”[3] We seem to be ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Chapter Four
THAT Sunday afternoon, after talking and laughing a great deal, Roland Zagreus sat silent near the fire in his big wheelchair, wrapped in white blankets. Mersault was leaning against a bookshelf, staring at the sky and the landscape through the white silk curtains. He had come during a light rain, and not wanting to arrive too early had spent an hour wandering around the countryside. The day was dark, and even without hearing the wind Mersault could see the trees and branches writhing silently in the little valley. The silence was broken by a milk-float, which trundled down the street past the villa in a tremendous racket of metal cans. Almost immediately the rain turned into a downpour, flooding the windowpanes. All thi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Within the past few days this wish has been uttered by thousands and thousands of people to one another; sometimes sincerely, sometimes carelessly, sometimes sarcastically. We also would join in the time-honored genial custom, and offer to our readers in every part of the globe, and not to them alone, but to all mankind, a happy new year. We have just grounds we think for doing so, for notwithstanding the terrible misery which surrounds us on every band, notwithstanding the vast number of fellow creatures to whom the word happiness is without meaning, the past year has witnessed great movement among the workers, and has been full of promise for the future. In the most pessimistic quarters, recent events have given birth to new hope. It seem... (From: AnarchyArchives.)
Revolt Library 
Anarchism 
