A Poem About Death — A hollowed heart, a haunted soul, A mortal corpse, now hellfire’s coal, Filthy, forgotten, food of worms, Tearful is the one who in flesh-grave turns. Broken battle-tools tarnished with mud, A soldier’s flag stained by blood, Lost lover’s necklace across the breast, A Magpie spots it from the nest. Bright…

Accessible, well-presented, and full of lessons. A review of Ruth Kinna’s take on the anarchist canon. Unlike with Marxism’s venerated namesake, the great Karl Marx himself, it has always been difficult to pin down a canon of anarchist thinkers. There are no schools of thought that venerate Kropotkin, Goldman or…

As Marx says, bureaucracy is ‘a circle from which no one can escape’. Leftists ignore it at your peril. — Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. With possibly one of the most famous opening lines in English literature, Franz Kafka began his novel, The Trial, with an abrupt statement of fact. His protagonist had been arrested by unidentified…

The Commoner talks to the Tāmaki Makaurau Anarchists, a group dedicated to promoting anarchism and resisting settler colonialism in Aotearoa/New Zealand. — Tucked away in a corner of the globe (as it appears to us all the way over here in the UK), our collective cause sees itself expressed in the Tāmaki Makaurau Anarchists, a group that pursues a free and egalitarian society in New Zealand, with a particular focus on returning…

The leading figures of early Japanese anarchism, and the event that led to their tragic execution. — In 1911, 12 leftists, both anarchists and socialists, were arrested and executed in an event that would come to be known as 大逆事件 (Taigyaku Jiken), or the High Treason Incident. Their crime? Conspiring (allegedly) to assassinate the Japanese emperor Meiji, the infamous ruler who oversaw Japan’s transition from a feudal…

The Commoner talks to Dog Section Press, an anarchist publisher and distributor based in the UK. Now here we have some distributors of fine literature to impart knowledge and inflame the passions of the revolutionary. Dog Section Press have been at this game for a few years now and have…

The Labour Party, like any left-wing party, is a trap for revolutionaries. Fight with them and you fight with the state. In 2016 I joined the Labour Party as an ambitious, if not slightly naive, revolutionary, inspired by Jeremy Corbyn and hopeful for the future. Four years later I left…

In Cherán, Indigenous People Took Justice into Their Own Hands. I ask: What Can Anarchists Learn from Them? Murray Bookchin, in his seminal work in the field of social ecology, The Ecology of Freedom, criticised the tendency of history to focus upon the ‘achievement of power’, the empires with their…

Answering the eternal question: ‘is Tom Nook evil?’ ‘Is Tom Nook evil?’ Every Animal Crossing fan you meet, whether new or old, will have a different answer to that question. To the haters, he is a greedy, overweight land baron who hoards your well-earned bells, to the fans, he is…