Fair Use Blog

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Contr'un:

The radical literature that any of us are actually familiar with always seems to be just a drop in the bucket. There are masses of largely ephemeral publications in every language, and all of the advances in digital archiving have only really begun to make any sort of dent in the work to be done. We can't ignore all that ephemera, unless we're content with a sort of abstract, top-down understanding of our traditions. After all, for every Proudhon, there were a dozen Greenes and Langlois, and for every one of them there were dozens of Junquas and Blackers, and for every one of them there were hundreds and thousands of rank-and-file radicals, many of them with ideas all their own. When we scour all the radical papers, we'll still only get a sample of the real history of the radical movements—but at least it will be a start.

In the meantime, a lot of the work to do involves relatively "big names" in radicalism. Some of that is, of course, translation. There's still a lot of work to do on Proudhon, and we've hardly started on his collaborators. We've also hardly started on his critics—and the literature of direct responses to Proudhon is huge by itself. This last weekend, while I was tabling the Portland Anarchist Bookfair, I dedicated my transit time to a pair of pamphlets debating the merits of Proudhon's work: "Histoire de M. Proudhon et de ses principes," by "Satan" and "Réponse à Satan au sujet de M. Proudhon" by "l'Archange Saint-Michel." "Satan" was apparently Georges-Marie Dairnvæll, the author of a number of other works, and the "Response" was published by the Société d'Education Mutuelle des Femmes, a group founded by Jeanne Deroin and Desirée Gay. I recently translated the manifesto ...

Read the whole thing at Contr'un.

Now available thanks to David Gross at Anarchoblogs in English:

23 October 2010

Wat Tyler is another name that frequently comes up when mention is made of English tax resisters of yore. From what I’ve been able to find out about the Tyler case, it seems to be more complicated than a case of tax resistance, though tax resistance seemed to play a part.

Here is chapter 38 from the Reverend John Adams’s 1813 textbook The Flowers of Modern History, telling one version of the Wat Tyler story:

Of the Insurrection occasioned by a Poll Tax, A.D. 1379.

In the reign of Richard, II. a poll tax was passed at twelve pence per head, on all above the age of sixteen. This being levied with severity, caused an insurrection in Kent and Essex.

A Blacksmith, well known by the name of Wat Tyler, was the first who excited the people to arms. The tax-gatherers coming to this man’s house, while he was at work, demanded payment for his daughter, which he refused, alledging that she was in the age mentioned in the act. One of the brutal collectors insisted on her being a full grown woman; and immediately attempted giving a very indecent proof of his assertion. This provoked the father to such a degree, that he instantly struck him dead with a blow of his hammer. The standers by applauded his spirit; and, one and all, resolved to defend his conduct. He was considered as a champion in the cause, and appointed the leader and spokesman of the people.

It is easy to imagine the disorders committed by this tumultuous rabble. The whole neighborhood rose in arms. They burnt and plundered wherever they came, and revenged upon their former masters, all those insults which they had long sustained with impunity.

As the discontent was general, the insurgents ...

Read the whole thing at Anarchoblogs in English.

Now available thanks to David Gross at Anarchoblogs in English:

15 October 2010

From the 15 October 1910 issue of The Vote come these reports of speeches given at a mass meeting in Trafalgar Square:

Mrs. Cobden Sanderson.

In the course of a well-reasoned speech, Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson said: We live in revolutionary times. The will of the people must prevail. The Portuguese Royal Family fell because it did not consider this. Berlin has also revolted, and the revolt there would have been more sanguinary had it not been for women, who placed themselves in the front — themselves and their children — and it takes much self-sacrifice to sacrifice your child. Here the women are also in revolt against the social and economical condition of things, for similar grievances prevail here to those which prevail in Tariff Reform Germany.

Mr. Lloyd George will be attacked more severely. Hitherto he has had some unpleasant moments; now we are going to attack his pocket. We are going to have our say in the spending of twelve millions on Dreadnoughts, and also on the reform of Poor Law system. I am a Poor Law guardian, but I am almost ashamed to own it, for I find the whole system of Poor Law administration is rotten to the core, and I work harder as such than in presenting petitions at Downing Street.

Our next move is to pay no taxes. It is the most direct and unanswerable method. If we are not good enough to vote, we are not good enough to pay. No vote, no tax. Those little income-tax forms, Form IV. or VI., or some other number, will be just thrown into the basket and not returned. Everyone who perhaps has not an income to be taxed can have a dog, and then refuse to pay tax.

We all at the ...

Read the whole thing at Anarchoblogs in English.

Three months ago, I happily announced that the complete text of the November 1914 issue of Mother Earth had been made available at the Fair Use Repository. To-day, I’m pleased to follow up that announcement — with the announcement that the Fair Use Repository now features the complete text of three issues of Mother Earth. The two issues recently made available are:

Mother Earth, Vol. VI., No. 11 (January, 1912)

This issue is mainly occupied with the arts and revolution. It leads off with Blaming the Fester, a poem by Rebekah E. Raney. The New Year is a fundraising appeal on the occasion of Christmastime and the New Year, while Observation and Comments includes short reports on current events — delays in the publication of Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, the trial of the bosses who’d locked workers into the the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, strikes and conspiracy trials around the country, Big Bill Haywood’s feud with the Socialist Party of America, and more.

Paul Orleneff offers a celebratory review (unsigned, but probably written by Emma Goldman) of the actor’s performances in New York. A Review of the Year, by Harry Kelly, and the continuation of a serialized article by Voltairine de Cleyre on The Mexican Revolution, discuss revolutions and uprisings flaring up throughout the world in 1911. In The Right to Live M. B. argues that political rights are empty without workers’ material control over the means of their own survival (the organization of society in a manner to insure to each the material basis of life and make it as self-evident as breathing). Max Baginski reviews the Autobiography of Richard Wagner, taking it as evidence of the old commonplace that one can be a great artist and yet small as a man, and concluding that The suffocating dependence of artistic production upon wealth and patronage should cause the true artist–who is not content to produce mere market ware–to turn relentlessly rebel against the existing standards, to become a communist. … The dream that Wagner once dreamed in Art and Revolution will some day be realized by the people,–nor will they need the aid of philosopher or king. The issue concludes with a continuation of the serialized article Economy as Viewed by An Anarchist by C. L. James, on the historical emergence of the bourgeois system and its connections with past forms of economic hierarchy, as well as with the subjection of women.

Mother Earth, Vol. VII., No. 12 (February, 1913)

The February 1913 issue has a few things to say about the State and a lot to say about the union struggle, Syndicalism, and government repression of striking workers. The issue leads off with To Our Friends, an appeal for readers to help widen the circulation of the journal, followed by another monthly instalment of short reports in Observations and Comments — including remarks on the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, the futility of appeals to the law, the advantages of direct action, new strike arbitration laws in New Zealand (among the first such labor laws in the world), the legal repression of Anarchists in the U.S., police scandals in Denver, and the incorporation of the Rockefeller fund.

James Montgomery’s The Black Hundreds of Plutocracy and Government discusses the use of private security forces, with tacit or explicit government approval, to inflict large-scale violence on striking workers. The New Idol, a translation of an excerpt from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, declares the State the coldest of all cold monsters. Theodor Johnson’s Help Save These Comrades! reports on the case of a group of striking Swedish dock workers, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a bomb plot, and calls for international solidarity to get their sentences commuted. Making a Strike a Crime government’s assault on the rights to picket and speak freely, with the imprisonment of dozens of peaceful picketers and speakers in Little Falls, New York during a textile mill strike. Intolerance in the Union comments on growing regimentation and bureaucratic control within conservative trade unions and reprints a letter from a comrade discussing his objections to a corrupt bargain made by his union’s labor bosses, which resulted in his being persecuted by the labor bosses and expelled from the union. Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice concludes a long article by Emma Goldman on state-free Syndicalist organizing, with a discussion of Syndicalism’s characteristic methods — Direct Action, Sabotage, and the General Strike. The issue concludes with Anarchist writer and teacher Bayard Boyesen’s review of Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, and with an announcement of dates for Emma Goldman’s lecture tour through the Midwest.

Onward

These issues complete a set of three reprinted issues of Mother Earth that I picked up from a table at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. I’d very much like to make available more of Mother Earth’s print run online. A number of partial and complete issues — mostly earlier issues — are currently available from The Anarchy Archives, and a fair amount is available for browsing in Google Books. But I’d like to liberate the latter from the Google Books’s inaccurate automatic markup, often capricious behavior, and hypertext-unfriendly environment. And in any case, there are a lot of gaps to fill in. If you have any suggestions on issues to prioritize, or good lines on copies to be transcribed, please feel free to leave a comment here, or contact me with the details.

Read, cite, and enjoy!

I’m happy to announce that the Fair Use Repository now features five complete articles from the January, 1912 issue of Mother Earth:

• Blaming the Fester, a poem by Rebekah E. Raney

• Observations and Comments, a regular feature in many issues of Mother Earth; the format is much like Tucker’s On Picket Duty — a sort of ongoing polemical Anarchist three-dot column that ran near the beginning of each issue.

• A Review of the Year by Harry Kelly — an overview and review of the upsurge in popular uprisings, general strikes and Anarchist revolutionary activity that broke out throughout the world in 1911.

• The Mexican Revolution (Continued), by Voltairine de Cleyre, previously published separately here in the Fair Use Blog — part of a serialized discussion of the uprising against the Madero provisional government in Mexico, with discussions of the crimes of the Mexican government against the Yaquis, the revolution in the North (Baja California, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Sonora) and South (Morelos, Chiapas, Tabasco, San Luis Potosi, and Yucatan), the victories of Emiliano Zapata, and the extreme importance of the peasants’ efforts to ignore the machinery of paper land-holding and reclaim the land they work.

• The Right to Live by M. B., on the hollowness and sham of political rights and the pivotal importance of the natural right to possess the means of existence.

These are the first set of articles to be put online from Mother Earth Volume VI. Number 11; more will come soon. I believe that the complete issue should be available online by the end of the next week.

Read, cite, and enjoy!

Continuing our collection of historical sources and political documents from the 1910s, especially those related to World War I, I’m happy to announce that the Fair Use Repository now features the complete text of two manifestos from British labor organizations taking on the outbreak of World War I.

• On August 1, 1914, the British Section of the International Socialist Bureau published the Manifesto to the British People, written by J. Keir Hardie and [Arthur Henderson], arguing that Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of the sudden, crushing attack made by the militarist Empire of Austria upon Servia, it is certain that the workers of all countries likely to be drawn into the conflict must strain every nerve to prevent their Governments from committing them to war.

• In September 1914, the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress issued a Manifesto to the Trade Unionists of the Country, supporting the war, praising the Labour Party’s role in the government’s military enlistment campaign, urging working-class men to enlist voluntarily in order to demonstrate to the world that a free people can rise to the supreme heights of a great sacrifice without the whip of conscription, and calling on the government to ensure that enlisted men receive at the hands of the State a reasonable and assured recompense, not so much for themselves as for those who are dependent upon them, and to take a liberal and even a generous view of its responsibilities toward those citizens who come forward to assist in the defence of their country.

The manifestos are taken from versions reprinted in the wartime anthology, Labour in war time (1915), by George Douglas Howard Cole; I initially put them up in order to fill out the references made to each of the two manifesto’s in Guy Aldred’s That Economic Army, which refers to each of them in the course of Aldred’s analysis of economic conscription, and how it had turned virtually all of English politics and civil society towards support of the war machine.

I’m happy to follow up our earlier announcement with an announcement that the Fair Use Repository now features the complete text of all the articles from the November 1914 issue of Mother Earth.

Most of the issue is occupied with Anarchist responses to, and debate over, the outbreak of World War I: Kropotkin on the Present War reprints Peter Kropotkin’s letter to Gustav Steffen, supporting the French government’s fighting in World War I; Alexander Berkman’s In Reply to Kropotkin calls Kropotkin to task and argues that Anarchists should oppose all sides in all government wars. Goldman and Berkman followed this argument with a reprint of Chapter I of Kropotkin’s own Wars and Capitalism, written in 1913, in which Kropotkin had skewered the French government’s motives and argued that wars were the product of imperial capitalism and that the reason for modern war is always the competition for markets and the right to exploit nations backward in industry. In addition to the exchange over Kropotkin’s letter, this issue also features That Economic Army, an article by Guy A. Aldred originally printed in the London Spur, which traces how the state and capital, during wartime, deformed the entire economy to draw not only men, but entire industries, into collaboration with the war machine, out of economic interest.

Alongside the discussion of the war, Vol. IX. No. 9 also features:

• The Persecution of Margaret Sanger by Harry Breckenridge, a defense and a call for working-class solidarity with Margaret Sanger and the Woman Rebel, then facing Federal prosecution for obscenity (for distributing articles on birth control and scientific information about sexual health).

• Black Friday of 1887 by M. B., a slashing review of the Socialist journalist Charles Edward Russell’s discussion of Haymarket in his memoirs, and a commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs hanged 11 November 1887.

• My Lecture Tour by Alexander Berkman, an announcement of Berkman’s upcoming lecture tour of the Midwest, with talks on War–At Home and Abroad, Unemployment and War, War and Culture, The War of the Classes, Is Labor Justified in Using Violence? Crime–In and Out of Prison, and The Psychology of Crime and Prisons.

• Emma Goldman Dates by Emma Goldman, an announcement of Emma Goldman’s upcoming lectures in Chicago on anti-militarism, Anarchism, and a lecture series on drama , as well as announcing dates for upcoming lecture series elsewhere in the Midwest.

I’m happy to have this issue of Mother Earth available in full. More issues should be coming soon.

Read, cite, and enjoy!

I’m happy to announce that the Fair Use Repository now features four complete articles from the November, 1914 issue of Mother Earth:

• Kropotkin on the Present War by Peter Kropotkin — a reprint of Kropotkin’s letter supporting the French government’s fighting in World War I;

• In Reply to Kropotkin by Alexander Berkman — in which Berkman calls Kropotkin to task, argues that the international working class has no real stake in bosses’ wars, and calls on Anarchists to oppose all sides in all government wars.

• Wars and Capitalism (Chapter I) by Peter Kropotkin, a reprint of Kropotkin’s earlier analysis of war, from 1913, in which he argued that the reason for modern war is always the competition for markets and the right to exploit nations backward in industry.

• Black Friday of 1887, by M. B., a slashing review of the Socialist journalist Charles Edward Russell’s discussion of Haymarket in his memoirs, and a commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs hanged 11 November 1887.

These are the first set of articles to be put online from Mother Earth Volume IX, Number 9; more will come soon. I believe that the complete issue should be available online by the end of the week.

Read, cite, and enjoy!

I’m happy to announce that the Fair Use Repository has added a new article to its collection: A Retrospect, an autobiographical sketch of the political development of A. L. Ballou, the individualist Anarchist and sometime contributor to Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty. (This A. L. Ballou should not be confused with Adin Ballou, 1803-1890, the abolitionist minister and advocate of Christian non-resistance.) The article, discussing Ballou’s development from Republican Party politics, to the freethought movement and the temperance movement, to the Greenback movement and Georgism, and ultimately out of electoral politics entirely to Anarchism and the method of passive resistance.

I am happy to announce that the full content of Benjamin Tucker’s Instead Of A Book, By A Man Too Busy To Write One is now available, online, through the Fair Use Repository!

The completion of the online edition adds the following new essays:

1. Part V. Communism.

   1. General Walker and the Anarchists.
   2. Herr Most on Libertas.
   3. Still Avoiding the Issue
   4. Herr Most Distilled and Consumed.
   5. Should Labor be Paid or Not?
   6. Does Competition Mean War?
   7. Competition and Monopoly Confounded.
   8. On Picket Duty.

2. Part VI. Methods.

   1. The Power of Passive Resistance.
   2. The Irish Situation in 1881.
   3. The Method of Anarchy.
   4. Theoretical Methods.
   5. A Seed Planted.
   6. The Home Guard Heard From.
   7. Colonization.
   8. Labor’s New Fetich.
   9. Mr. Pentecost’s Belief in the Ballot.
   10. A Principle of Social Therapeutics.
   11. The Morality of Terrorism.
   12. The Beast of Communism.
   13. Time Will Tell.
   14. The Facts Coming to Light.
   15. Liberty and Violence.
   16. Convicted by a Packed Jury.
   17. Why Expect Justice from the State?
   18. The Lesson of the Hour
   19. Convicted for their Opinions.
   20. To the Breach, Comrades!
   21. On Picket Duty.

3. Part VII. Miscellaneous.

   1. The Lesson of Homestead.
   2. Save Labor from its Friends
   3. Is Frick a Soldier of Liberty?
   4. Shall Strikers be Court-Martialled?
   5. Census-Taking Fatal to Monopoly.
   6. Anarchy Necessarily Atheistic.
   7. A Fable for Malthusians
   8. Auberon Herbert and his Work.
   9. Solutions of the Labor Problem.
   10. Karl Marx as Friend and Foe.
   11. Do the Knights of Labor Love Liberty?
   12. Play-House Philanthropy.
   13. Beware of Batterson!
   14. A Gratifying Discovery.
   15. Cases of Lamentable Longevity.
   16. Spooner Memorial Resolutions.
   17. On Picket Duty.

There are still the usual finishing touches (internal links, details of the front matter, minor points of formatting, etc.) to apply. But this book is basically done, and all 497 pages worth of content are, in any case, available for you to read, cite, and enjoy!