Fair Use Blog

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!

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!