Welcome! Newsletter number 10.
Still no new reviews on this site, but I’ve reviewed a few books elsewhere: The AngryWorkers’ Class Power on Zero-Hours for Soundings, Jonas Bals’ Streik! for Arbetaren (in Swedish), and Woran hat’s gelegen?, a book about professional soccer careers that went awry, for junge Welt (in German).
For junge Welt, I also talked to Sámi activist Beaska Niillas about the resistance against a copper mine in Nussir, in Norway’s far north. Remarkably, German copper giant Aurubis has recently pulled out of the project, which prompted me to write an update about the situation in Sápmi in English, published by Counterpunch and translated into German by the folks of Schwarzer Pfeil.
I covered the Norwegian parliamentary elections for junge Welt in two articles (one prior to the elections, one thereafter) and interviewed Marie Sneve Martinussen of the Marxist Red Party, which received a surprising 5 percent of the votes. (Speaking of surprising election results: the Austrian Communist Party, nearly insignificant nationwide, won the local elections in Graz, the country’s second-biggest city. If you feel inclined, you can revisit a longer article I wrote about the Graz communists for Counterpunch in 2013 – Elke Kahr is still chairwoman.)
On the sports pages of junge Welt, I wrote about the start of the NFL season and David Meggyesy’s 1971 book Out of Their League, table hockey, the Austrian men’s national football team, and the discussions about mental health among athletes.
My article “What Happened to the Anarchist Century” has been translated into Bulgarian and appears in a beautifully done zine, together with the 2004 piece by Andrej Grubacic and David Graeber that the article refers to, and Grubacic’s response.
Simon Hedelin is keeping alive the discussion on strategy within the SAC, my union, with a new article in Arbetaren (I threw in my two cents in both Swedish and English).
The School of Marxist Fundamentals has organized a study circle based on my book All Power to the Councils!. The same folks (it seems like) have uploaded a reading of the first chapter of the book on YouTube – which made me think that the very first sentence isn’t all that clear, a reminder for why I never return to older texts unless I’m forced to.
A few clips that are more than ten years old have also appeared on YouTube. They were recorded for a documentary about anarchism that never saw the light of day; they disappeared, and then reappeared on different online platforms a couple of years ago. Let’s do an experiment: if you have absolutely nothing else to do, click on the one about how I “first heard about anarchism” (you don’t have to watch it, just click on it), and we’ll see if the number of views will have reached triple digits by the end of the month. I’m not on social media, so this is a rare test opportunity! I have no clue about how these things work.
Not only am I not on social media, I don’t know anything about gaming either, which makes it all the more exciting that my book on pirates, Life Under the Jolly Roger, features in some way in the popular online role-playing game New World (or whatever the appropriate wording would be). BhaktiGamer has the answers!
I’ve come across a few calls in the last month that I wanted to share…
The fabulous Cindy Milstein is looking for contributions to a new anthology with the working title The Anarchist Feminist Turn.
The Feral Crust collective in the Philippines is raising funds for their “land and community project“. If you haven’t already, check out A Radical Guide in this context, too, a three-year old online platform whose listings continue to grow.
The folks at the Riseup tech collective are doing one of their regular fundraisers; here is their donate page.
There’s also a new, highly promising, network of activists called the Cloudberry Collective, “supporting anti-colonial action and decolonial initiatives in Europe”. They are organizing several “meet-ups” in October and November. Find all relevant information here.
Four German antifascists caught in a trial staged as a blow to the “terrorist left” need support – you might have heard about the case in connection with “Lina E.“, their alleged leader.
Jonas Lundström, top-notch writer, exemplary activist, and all-round great geezer, now has a Patreon page.
Stay safe!