Anarchists In Love (The Generation Quartet)

Product Information

The Faber Book of Food, an Anthology (with Claire Clifton), 1994, Faber and Faber ISBN 978-0-571-16467-7. Reports From Behind (with Chris Barlas), 1984, Enigma Books (with 27 illustrations by Colin Spencer), ISBN 978-0727820389.

There is therefore a rich corpus of historiography on Spanish anarchism adopting socio-cultural perspectives: histories of everyday life, of the family, and of sexuality. Footnote 21 Despite the centrality of women as objects of such studies, however, it proves difficult to draw out female voices as subjects. There were few female anarchists in leadership roles, few who wrote frequently in the periodical press, and few who belonged to the network of anarchist medics intervening in discourse on gender and sexuality. Footnote 22 For these reasons it is all the more remarkable that so many of the queries sent to La Revista Blanca's advice columns came from women. Either using their own names or employing pseudonyms such as ‘One of the Libertarian Youth’ or ‘A Young Woman’, they belonged to a range of age groups and wrote from all over Spain. The anarchists’ revolution in sexual morality would incorporate new conceptions of gender and new stances on reproductive autonomy, placing women's bodies at their centre. In writing this history it is thus imperative to access women's own voices. Footnote 23 Colin Spencer had huge fun working alongside Katharine Whitehorn to illustrate her column in the national Sunday newspaper, The Observer, with satirical drawings delineating the public's interpretation of fashion trends. He was commissioned by the Royal Opera House to draw their idiosyncratic opera audience for their members' Magazine. He has completed oil portraits for a wide range of private customers and collectors, including Carl Winter, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Lady Rawlinson; Diana Hopkinson; Michael Davidson; and Canon Frederic Hood of Pusey House, Oxford. His work resides in a wide range of private collections amongst those of Melvyn Bragg, Germaine Greer, Derek Grainger, Bob Swash, Diana Athill, Prue Leith and the late Mary Renault and Sir Huw Wheldon.His subsequent artistic work ranged from landscape drawings of Winchelsea Beach and Rye countryside to oil portraits of the poet Harry Fainlight and has lately been exhibited in London, Rye and Brighton. A recent series of paintings entitled The Downs reflected the sensuous forms of the landscape of the South Downs where he lived. He was latterly intensely involved in creating paintings which he described as "images of the unknown, paths through conflict, compounds of sex and spirit, mysterious reflections, hints and fading memories which unsettle the darkness." The themes of his recent paintings are: War, Music, and Sex, the interior life of flowers, the sea bed and how do hills form roots. Bowling for Anarchy: The Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League – Empty Hands History on RAGE! Anarchism in the Late 1980s

in which Serge, a former anarchist exiled in Russia, defends the Bolshevik Party, saying the Party ‘must know how to stand firm sometimes against the masses’ and ‘to bring dissent to obey’. Nov 23: ‘Feminism Practices What Anarchism Preaches’: Anarcha-Feminism in the 20th Century (Panel Recording) in which Foucault says that ‘by Islamic government, nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.’ Foucault also seemed to believe that under such an Islamic government, ‘between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights.’ Pride in one's ‘natural’ male or female body was paramount in La Revista Blanca's consciousness-raising efforts. To this end, nudism was considered by its anarchist practitioners to challenge the revulsion towards unclothedness perpetuated by the Church, and to be an egalitarian form of expression because clothing – a visual indication of social stratification – was cast aside. Footnote 67 Nudists across Europe, anarchist and non-anarchist alike, saw connection to one's own body as something genuine in an increasingly artificial world. Footnote 68 Although the editorial team expressed confidence in nudism's social value when asked about it in the advice column, this did not prompt them to foment what we would now call ‘body-positivity’. Footnote 69 Rising public discussion of physical fitness and fashion at the turn of the century widened the gap between socially legitimate female bodies and real female bodies, leaving many women feeling ‘dis-embodied’ – unable to attain the corporeal perfection that society expected them to. Footnote 70 La Revista Blanca's exacerbation of this problem likely contributed to the limited take-up of nudist practices. Footnote 71 One advice column response discussing controversially short skirts concluded they were only recommendable to women with ‘well-toned’ legs, and when asked about whether hats were unhygienic the answer was that regardless of hygiene they were a good option for women who unattractively cut their hair short. Footnote 72 They also chose to print a submission which seemingly advocated that women undergo cosmetic procedures to please their partners: ‘I have a girlfriend – certainly very pretty – but made ugly by the hair on her face. What remedy is there to remove it?’ Footnote 73 Western thought traditionally established a binary between nakedness, associated with embarrassment, and nudity, connoting artistic beauty. Footnote 74 La Revista Blanca aspired to replace the former mentality with the latter, but was restrictively grounded in a eugenic worldview that subjectively considered some bodies to be closer to perfection than others.This perspective prefigured later developments in queer anarchist theory. The Mary Nardini Gang argues in “Toward the Queerest Insurrection” in 2014 that queer is not simply a sexual identity but rather “the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability […] Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. […] By ‘queer’, we mean ‘social war.’ And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination, we mean it.” [7] In this view, anarchism is inherently queer because it rejects the “normalcy” of capitalist patriarchy and struggles against all forms of hierarchy and oppression. Whether or not ACT UP strictly conformed to anarchist theory and practice was beside the point; AIDS activists took whatever opportunity they could to respond to an existential crisis. It may be useful to lay out an anarchist critique of state-centered AIDS activism, but to apply a “pure” anarchist standard to ACT UP verged on a dogmatic prioritization of anarchist politics over the lives of people with AIDS. Public Humanities and Collective Education at Ithaca’s Socialist Night School – Empty Hands History on Marxist Reading Group: Introductory Syllabus

Goldman's two-year experience in Soviet Russia had compelled her to "transvalue" her views on the nature of revolution and the task of anarchists, on which she often reflected during her exile. Primarily, Goldman had forsaken anarchists' "old attitude to revolution as a violent eruption"; rather, she began to assert that "revolution must essentially be a process of reconstruction." 75 Her proposal involved intensive educational work and advocacy for the expansion of democratization, among other strategies. 76 The task of anarchists, in Goldman's opinion, was to lead the revolution toward the process of reconstruction through means that would serve "the ultimate end of all revolutionary social change" to "establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being." 77 "The function of Anarchism in a revolutionary period is to minimize the violence of revolution and replace it by constructive efforts," Goldman concluded in a 1938 letter. 78 His scholarly interest in food culture and history led to the publication of The Heretic's Feast – a History of Vegetarianism in 1993 (also published in the US in 1995, and winning a special mention in the Premio Langhe Ceretto prize of Italy), the award-winning British Food – an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History in 2002, and his recently published book From Microliths to Microwaves – The Evolution of British Agriculture, Food and Cooking, an account of the long history of farming, food and cookery in Britain and how our national cuisine was forged. From Microliths to Microwaves, The Evolution of British Agriculture, Food and Cooking, May 2011, Grub Street, ISBN 978-1-908117-00-7. Lessons from the History of Chinese Anarchism – The Polar Blast on Lessons from the History of Chinese AnarchismIf it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. . . You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” – Ursula K. Le Guin the first thing that YOU have to do, young lady, is emancipate yourself economically, so that hardship does not obligate you to live forever with a man whom you could stop loving’. Footnote 1 This was the advice imparted by the editorial team of the anarchist periodical, La Revista Blanca, to a girl who had written to their advice column expressing curiosity about ‘free love’. It encapsulated the gendered dynamics of the anarchist sexual revolution: in theory men and women were equally free to decide the lengths of sexual partnerships, unburdened by marriage, but in practice women's sexual freedom was conditional on the overhaul of the patriarchal distribution of economic power. This article frames the interwar Spanish anarchist press as a venue of political, medical, and cultural thought which straddled the complex intersection between sexual revolution and ‘women's emancipation’. It explores how the anarchists harnessed advice columns as radical spaces to empower, educate, and provide medical care to readers, as well as platforming their concerns. Advice columns offer us insight into the connections between private and public morality, as they were forums for the discussion and resolution of intimate problems. Footnote 2 Using La Revista Blanca and interwar Spanish anarchism as a case study, the article interrogates how political movements have historically constructed socio-cultural – including socio-sexual – moralities via interactive media. Footnote 3 Most of these books and articles are on the web and can be found via the version of this article at: Seven of Colin Spencer's plays have been performed since the first production in December 1966 at the Hampstead Theatre Club of The Ballad of The False Barman. It was directed by Robin Phillips and featured Caroline Blakiston, Penelope Keith and Michael Pennington. The play is a musical fantasy set in a beach bar run by a bald-headed lesbian "barman" and peopled by whores of various sexes and their clientele, including a transvestite thieving vicar. In its advice columns, Doctor Klug and the editorial team advocated for ‘free unions’ to replace marriages. These involved ceremonies akin to weddings except secular, not based on material wealth, and without any legal expectation to keep one's vows for life. Footnote 127 Although divorce was legalised in Spain in 1932, ‘free unions’ were presented as a means to avoid marriage in the first place. Footnote 128 This was ‘not only to dispense with the judge and the priest’, in line with their antiauthoritarian principles, but because they believed firmly that ‘one falls in love multiple times’ in life, and therefore committing to only one relationship was senseless. Footnote 129 The editorial team were aware that at present economic uncertainty – disproportionately felt by women – made living in such freedom difficult, but promised this issue would be resolved in the post-revolutionary anarchist society. Footnote 130 Men were often reminded of this gendered burden: when a man wrote that he regretted marrying his wife, he was urged to ‘bear in mind that poor women do not receive social assistance or sufficient economic means to be able to do the same things as men. It's not acceptable to take advantage of them!’ Footnote 131 Pluralidad amorosa (having more than one monogamous relationship in one's lifetime) was advocated in other anarchist periodicals too, by individuals like Frenchman Han Ryner and Brazilian María Lacerda de Moura. Footnote 132 Federica Montseny herself entered into a ‘free union’ in 1930 with the anarchist Germinal Esgleas, with whom she would raise three children. Footnote 133 ‘Free love’ in theory offered individuals the liberty to enjoy sexual partnerships with whomever they chose, for however long they saw fit.

The Trial of St George, March 1972: Soho Poly, London. 1972: Thalia Theater, Hamburg. 1972: Der Kammerspielen, Wuppertal.

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All these communes are virtually self-supporting – the only things they need to get from outside are heavy machinery like tractors & perhaps coal & minerals like cobalt. It is the complete decentralization of industry advocated by Kropotkin in ‘Fields, Factories & Workshops’. … I wish you could see what is going on here socially & economically – it is the biggest & most successful revolution in history, & very inspiring. We spent this morning at Peking University & there too (in education) they have there own completely convincing methods. … in which Chomsky says ‘there appears to be high degree of democratic participation at the village and regional levels.’