Welcome! Newsletter number 65.
I was traveling last month. Very busy schedule. I visited South Tyrol a couple of times since I‘m working on a book about the region. I talked about it on the Doppelpunkt podcast of Salto. I also presented the Italian edition of Soccer vs. the State in Meran/Merano. The event was hosted by ANPI, the “National Association of Partisans in Italy”, which felt honorable.
I also visited with people from the “Left-Wing Union Block” GLB in Vienna, and with members of the Karmína collective in Bratislava. The latter showed me the community space they are sharing. It was great to see. People train boxing there!
Not much sports writing for junge Welt last month, only a review of the German edition of James Montague’s Engulfed. How Saudi Arabia Bought Sport, and the World.
A little sports writing in Swedish, as I contributed to the Football World Cup special by Clarté. I wrote about Switzerland and Palestine – someone else had already taken Austria. Cheeky.
More articles in Swedish were published in Arbetaren, one about the elections in Hungary, the other about the Kimberly-Clarke warehouse fire in Ontario, California.
While no longer general secretary of the SAC, I’m still in the International Committee, and so I talked about the union via stream at the Contemporary Libertaire Theories and Practices III conference, organized by folks in Russia. Online presentations are always a bit awkward, but I saw the audience and it felt nice.
Some news from France: La vie ouvrière, the journal of the CGT, the main French trade union federation, published an article about antifascism in Sweden with a focus on SAC member Björn Söderberg, who was murdered by neo-Nazis in 1999. The author of the article, Juliette Robert, came to visit International Committee member Saman Bona and me in the SAC offices a few months ago. Meanwhile, nada éditions released a book about anarchism and sobriety, which took its title, Sobres pour la révolution, from Sober Living for the Revolution. (I’m not assuming this, it says so in the book.) If you read French and have an interest in these matters, it’s well worth picking it up! (Nice illustrations, too.)
Finally, I’d like to bring your attention to the Icarus Project Archive, run by Sascha Altman DuBrul, who has done very important work regarding mental health and radical communities for many years. The website received an overhaul, and Sascha seems to have been very active as of late. Well worth checking out!
More next month. Stay safe!