state

I hope that one day it will be realised by our government officials how much betrayal they have served to the floors on which they stand and where they belong. It is very sad that our politicians forget that their power started with people like us, people like the red shirts.

"[i]If the productive capacities already deployed were oriented towards need, necessary labour would be reduced to a minimum, so that nothing would stand between men and what they need to live. Money and the law of labour would lose their force, and, as its foundations crumbled, the political state would wither away.

To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war [World War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought.

Text originally from Project Gutenberg. Available as a pdf file below.

A member of Haringey Solidarity Group, speaking to Freedom Anarchist newspaper, has condemned the government initiative as a cheap attempt to head off a growing community movement throughout the UK resentful of relentless losses of and cuts to services. He said: “. From the community angle anti-social behaviour is a real issue and it’s true it can have a disproportionately large effect.

In this abridged translation of an article originally published in Wildcat (Germany), it is shown how the state is using the issue of racism to develop its 'social strategy of tension'.

Žižek draws on Giorgio Agamben's notion of Homo sacer - someone who is biologically alive but deproved of all rights - in order to understand the rationales and causes of the 'war on terror'.

"We can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies." A short article written in response to the 9-11 attacks by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [Frankfurt general newspaper] September 20, 2001.

From Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195-228 translated from the French by Alan Sheridan © 1977

The following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.

[b]This interview illustrates the move amongst the post-Leninist Italian radical left towards an anarchist view of the state, as well as Virno’s insistence that the concept of ‘multitude’ does not replace the concept of ‘working class’ and his controversial assertion that fear and insecurity – which he calls ‘precarity’ – define the globalised world.

An excerpt from the 2005 book State of Exception which serves as a good introduction to Agamben’s recent work on the nature of state power/sovereignty, as well as his dense and difficult style (5,000 words).

This piece of Anarchist Research, originally published in Black Flag in 1991, takes as its starting point the book 'El Oro de Negrin' by Francisco Olaya (Ediciones Madre Tierra (Mostoles 1990)). It tells the story of the Moscow Gold and how the Spanish war was lost.

This piece appeared in Black Flag #207, which came out around January 1996. Conspiracy theorists might be interested in the remarkable prescience Albert showed talking about Diana, Princess of Wales.

The issue of elections to state bodies has once again become live. Anarchists today are presented with arguments for their use from two angles. Firstly, there is Murray Bookchin and his allies, the social ecologists who argue for "libertarian municipalism".

"Revolution on the continent is ripe and will quickly assume a proletarian form; but will it not be snuffed out in the bud by the nascent capitalisms of Russia and China, where bourgeois society is still in its embryo?"
Letter of Marx to Engels, 1857

The Emperor System and the Limits of Post-War Democracy - interview with Amano Yasukazu

Presented in PDF Format (631kb).

Terror, Taboo and Silence: Speaking out on the Emporer System - Nakagawa Nobuaki
Presented in PDF format (3mb).

Rites of Rule and Submission
Interview with Odawara Norio
Presented in PDF Format (500kb).

Building Japan's Corporate Society - Totsuka Hideo

Presented in PDF format (1mb)

Kanri Shaki - The Managed Society - C Douglas Lewis & Kogawa Tetsuo

Presented in PDF format (2mb)