A lone stone-ring stands broken
under a bare sky. A barren field,
full with shrubs, is swallowing up its foundations.
Nature creeps in, heeding the call of time,
and dares to drag it down into the earth.

Mice come there to make shelter,
crows land to pick at its mossy coat.
Neither knew the old-ones, those who knew
this ring’s duty, those whose histories
and ideas imbued it with a sense of purpose.

A faded ring, with aging rocks,
it contains little, gives few clues
to the academic, those with ambition
far grander than the footnotes of history. …

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 Malatesta. This is, of course, very typical of anarchism’s “no gods no masters” approach to theory and practise. Nonetheless, it is always helpful to have some names at hand that someone may become acquainted with, and whose works can be read to introduce them to the basics of anarchist thought.

…

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 agents, and was soon to be dragged through a drawn out, mysterious judicial process dictated by a remote, unspecified court authority. His crime? He has no idea, and he nor the reader will ever find out.

Kafka’s novel has many interpretations, but has become well-known for portraying the perils of…

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 land to its historical inhabitants, the Māori. They do not see themselves as the answer to this revolutionary spirit, but rather one of its many scattered but interconnected catalysts for change. As well as dedicating themselves to ridding New Zealand (or as it should be known, Aotearoa) of its…

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, isolationist kingdom into an imperialistic, industrialised world power.

Beginning with the discovery of potential bomb making materials in the apartment of a factory worker in the Nagano Prefecture, the incident resulted in the mass arrest of 26 socialists who were then trailed for high treason charges in secret. The event…

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 published many interesting works on a variety of topics pertaining to anarchist theory and action. Two noteworthy examples are Make Rojava Green Again (Debbie Bookchin), which outlines social ecology and how this is put into action in said region, and DOPE magazine, a quarterly newspaper that keeps you informed of…