Although traces of anarchist ideas are found all throughout history, modern anarchism emerged from the Enlightenment. During the latter half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, the anarchist movement flourished in most parts of the world and had a significant role in workers' struggles for emancipation. Various anarchist schools of thought formed during this period. Anarchists have taken part in several revolutions, most notably in the Paris Commune, the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Civil War, whose end marked the end of the classical era of anarchism. In the last decades of the 20th and into the 21st century, the anarchist movement has been resurgent once more, growing in popularity and influence within anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation movements. (Full article...)
Golos Truda (The Voice of Labour) was a Russian languageanarcho-syndicalist newspaper. Founded by working-class Russian expatriates in New York in 1911, Golos Truda shifted to Petrograd during the Russian Revolution in 1917, when its editors took advantage of the general amnesty and right of return for political dissidents. There, the paper integrated itself into the nascent anarcho-syndicalist movement, pronounced the necessity of a social revolution of and by the workers, and situated itself in opposition to the myriad of other left-wing movements.
The rise to power of the Bolsheviks marked the turning point for the newspaper however, as the new government enacted increasingly repressive measures against the publication of dissident literature and against anarchist agitation in general, and after a few years of low-profile publishing, the Golos Truda collective was finally expunged by the Stalinist regime in 1929. (read more...)
...that the parents of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini gave him the middle name "Amilcare" in honour of the revolutionary anarchist Amilcare Cipriani(pictured)?
The economic dictatorship of the monopolies and the political dictatorship of the totalitarian state are the outgrowth of the same political objectives, and the directors of both have the presumption to try to reduce all the countless expressions of social life to the mechanical tempo of the machine and to tune everything organic to the lifeless machine of the political apparatus. Our modern social system has split the social organism in every country into hostile classes internally, and externally it has broken the common cultural circle up into hostile nations; and both classes and nations confront one another with open antagonism and by their ceaseless warfare keep the communal social life in continual convulsions. The late World War and its terrible after effects, which are themselves only the results of the present struggles for economic and political power, are only the logical consequences of this unendurable condition, which will inevitably lead us to a universal catastrophe if social development does not take a new course soon enough. The mere fact that most states are obliged today to spend from fifty to seventy percent of their annual income for so-called national defence and the liquidation of old war debts is proof of the untenability of the present status, and should make clear to everybody that the alleged protection which the state affords the individual is certainly purchased too dearly.
The ever growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave is putting ever greater obstacles in the way of the solidaric co-operation of human beings and crushing out every possibility of new development. A system which in every act of its life sacrifices the welfare of large sections of the people, yes, of whole nations, to the selfish lust for power and the economic interests of small minorities must of necessity dissolve all social ties and lead to a constant war of all against all. This system has been merely the pacemaker for the great intellectual and social reaction which finds its expression today in modern Fascism, far surpassing the obsession for power of the absolute monarchy of past centuries and seeking to bring every sphere of human activity under the control of the state. Just as for the various systems of religious theology, God is everything and man nothing, so for this modern political theology, the state is everything and the man nothing. And just as behind the "will of God" there always lay hidden the will of privileged minorities, so today there hides behind the "will of the state" only the selfish interest of those who feel called to interpret this will in their own sense and to force it upon the people.
1906 - After having attempted to kill Alfonso XIII of Spain at his wedding, Catalan anarchist Mateu Morral (pictured) killed the guard transporting him to prison, and then committed suicide.
1876 - Christo Botev (Khristo Bôtef) (1848-1876) dies. Bulgarian poet & revolutionist, propagandist, writer; first Bulgarian anarchist. Leads a partisan army of 200 fighters into Bulgaria to overthrow Ottoman rule. Dies in battle.
1890 - Louise Michel's political opponents attempt to place her in an insane asylum. Michel flees to England.
1919 - Anarchists influenced by Luigi Galleani carry out a series of coordinated bombings across the eastern United States. Explosions also damage the homes of Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer & Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt; the bomber is killed in the process.
1919 - Luigi Bertoni & Italian anarchists, implicated in the "Plot of Zurich", appear in a Swiss court today, after being held in detention the previous 13 months. The so-called "plot" was a political pretext to arrest Bertoni, publisher of "Le Réveil communiste anarchiste", & others opposing World War I. A nationwide protest movement agitated for their release.
1925 - Gueorgui Cheitanov dies (1896 &ndash 1925). Anarchist militant captured & executed, along with his companion Mariola Sirakova & others, by the Aleksandar Tsankov led government during a crackdown on leftists following a Communist bombing in Sofia.
1991 - Procession in Sofia to the monument of Christo Botev, the first Bulgarian anarchist & national hero, who perished in the struggle for liberation of Bulgaria from Turkish power today in 1876 (noted above).
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