Notes

Future Episodes: Israel-Palestine and Anarchism, Anarchist Artists, Bakunin, Means and Ends, Libertarian Communism, Italian Marxism

Israel-Palestine and Anarchism with Uri Gordon

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/topic/israel-palestine

  1. Israel taking strategic queues from Russia: Alliance with Putin/Trump Axis
  2. Understand Oct, 7th: Hamas Martyring their own population – doesn’t justify Israel’s response.
  3. Armed Gangs on Both Sides
  4. Zionism:
    • Term is used ambiguously to signal support for Jews
    • Term becomes a stand-in for Jews and/or Israelis
    • A black/white litmus test
    • Obsession with Zionism is mainly a way of washing their hands of antisemitism while continuing to adopt an ignorant, black/white view.
    • Opposition to Zionism but not Nationalism in general is a problem:
      • what is the starting point: general opposition or nationalism or specific to Palestine
  5. Anti-LBET group

Anarchist Artists with Salomé Buzzard

I. Biography of Pissarro

A. Born in 1830–between two major French revolutions.

B. Major friendships, colleagues, influences–Paris

1. Monet, Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, Degas.

2. Kropotkin, Proudhon, Goldman

C. Collapse of the Commune/Expatriation to London

D. Later years–Belgium II. Anarchist themes in Pissarro’s Works

A. Consistent centrality of workers

1. Dignity of the worker

2. Utopian themes

B. A pacifist, not a revolutionary

C. <<Les turpitudes sociales>>

III. Anarchism and Impressionism

A. Rejection of (what we would call) photorealism

B. Rejection of hagiographic portraiture of the aristocracy

C. Pastoralism, romanticism, and peasant dignity

Bakunin with Douglas Lain

Mikhail Bakunin: the philosophical basis of his anarchism – Paul McLaughlin

Bakunin: a libertarian communist before the term was coined – Daniel Guérin

Means and Ends with Zoe Baker

Libertarian Communism with C Derick Varn

Anarchism has for many years suffered from an undeserved disrepute, from an iniustice which has manifested itself in three ways.

Firstly, its detractors claim that it is simply a thing of the past. It did not survive the great revolutionary tests of our time: the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Revolution. It has no place in the modern world, a world characterised by centralisation, by large political and economic entities, by the idea of totalitarianism. There is nothing left for the anarchists to do but, “by force of circumstance” as Victor Serge put it, to “join the revolutionary Marxists.”

Secondly, the better to devalue it, those who would slander anarchism serve up a tendentious interpretation of its doctrine. Anarchism is essentially individualistic, particularistic, hostile to any form of organisation. It leads to fragmentation, to the egocentric withdrawal of small local units of administration and production. It is incapable of centralizing or of planning. It is nostalgic for the “golden age.” It tends to resurrect archaic social forms. It suffers from a childish optimism; its “idealism” takes no account of the solid realities of the material infrastructure. It is incurably petitbourgeois; it places itself outside of the class movement of the modern proletariat. In a word, it is “reactionary.”

 And finally, certain of its commentators take care to rescue from oblivion and to draw attention to only its most controversial deviations, such as terrorism, individual assassinations, propaganda by explosives and so on.

Preface of 1970 to Guérin (ed.), Ni Vieu ni Maftre. Antholoqie de l’anarchisme (Paris: La Decouverte, 1999), vol.
I, pp. 6–7.

Italian Marxism with C Derick Varn

The History of Italian Marxism: From its Origins to the Great War

International Labor with David van-Deusen, René Berthier, and potential Rojava militant

more info coming…