The new issue of Black Flag: Anarchist Review is now available:
This year’s third issue has, more by accident than by design, a decidedly anti-parliamentarian aspect to it. We start with four notable radical women whose writings should be of interest to libertarians today even if they may not be as well-known as they should be.
Lousia Sarah Bevington (1845-1895) was an English anarchist, essayist and poet. She wrote for the Commonweal and Freedom, although she seemed to be most associated with the London Liberty, edited by the Scottish anarchist and tailor James Tochatti, for which she wrote numerous articles and poems. Some of these were re-issued as pamphlets, including her “Why I Am an Expropriationist” along with William Morris’s “Why I Am a Communist”. She also wrote a Manifesto for the short-lived Anarchist Communist Alliance. Kropotkin was amongst those who attended her funeral, indicating her importance to the movement. As such, it is good to introduce her to modern radicals.
We then discuss Scottish anarchist Ethel MacDonald (1909-1960), a stalwart of the Anti-Parliamentarian Communist movement before and after the Second World War. After the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution, she went to Barcelona to report on it but was soon making radio broadcasts on behalf of the CNT-FAI. With the rising Communist-led counter-revolution, she helped revolutionaries to escape from Spain. Here we reproduce many of her reports and broadcasts from Barcelona as well as two articles.
Next is Ethel Mannin (1900-1984), a noted writer but also a revolutionary. Initially a Trotskyist, she became a libertarian after working with the anarchists publishing Spain and the World and Emma Goldman during the Spanish Revolution.
Then we discuss Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) and her journey from suffragette to anti-Parliamentarian Communist as well as her links to anarchism. We show that her experiences in the struggle lead her to anarchist conclusions and that she re-evaluated her initial support for Bolshevism to become an anti-Bolshevik communist whose critique echoed the anarchist analysis. While best remembered of the four, her communist period is often glossed over.
This is followed by an overview of the post-First War World Anti-Parliamentarian movement (which Pankhurst and MacDonald were connected to) and a recent article by an Australian anarchist on the need for socialists to recognise the importance of anti-parliamentarianism.
We end with two reviews and our usual round-up of movement news, Parish Notices.
Original translations which appear in Black Flag: Anarchist Review eventually appear on-line here:
https://anarchistfaq.org/translations/index.html
Next year we aim to continue to cover a range of people and subjects. These will hopefully include John Most, Alexander Berkman, Guy Aldred, the Haymarket events, the British General Strike, Mother Earth, amongst others.
However, this work needs help otherwise at some stage it will end. Contributions from libertarian socialists are welcome on these and other subjects! We are a small collective and always need help in writing, translating and gathering material, so please get in touch if you want to see Black Flag Anarchist Review continue.
This issue’s editorial and contents are here: https://anarchistfaq.org/anarcho/black-flag-anarchist-review-autumn-2025-issue-now-out/
Ethel Mannin was never a…
Ethel Mannin was never a Trotskyist. She was in the ILP, but that hardly made her a Trot.
William Morris’s “Why I Am a…
‘Objection has been made to the use of the word “Communism” to express fully-developed Socialism, on the ground that it has been used for the Community-Building, which played so great a part in some of the phases of Utopian Socialism, and is still heard of from time to time nowadays. Of Communism in this sense I am not writing now; it may merely be said in passing that such experiments are of their nature non-progressive; at their best they are but another form of the Mediæval monastery, withdrawals from the Society of the Way, really implying hopelessness of a general change
...we are in earnest in wishing to see Communism realised. I am opposed to Anarchism then (among other reasons) because it forbids the use of the only possible method for bringing about the great change from privilege and inequality and property to equality and general wealth. So much for its tactics. As to its theory, I must say that I cannot recognise Anarchism (as it has been expounded to me) as a possible condition of Society, for it seems to me in its essence to be a negation of society; I rather look upon it as a mood engendered by the wrongs and follies of our false society of inequality, and which will disappear with them. A kind of idealised despair, surely not justified by the state of the socio-political movement of today; which is most certainly setting towards Socialism in its narrower sense, and consequently towards socialism in its wider sense, which is what I have been speaking of as communism.’
Don't like his wallpaper…
Don't like his wallpaper either.
Don't like his prices.
Don't like his prices.
I am opposed to Anarchism…
And what is the only possible method Morris speaks of here?
The forceable imposition of…
The forceable imposition of its needs by "the Community which produces wealth" on the classes that expropriate wealth, "and to practically thrust them out of the Community and constitute them a class of inferiority."
'We must force them into submission, or cajole them into it.' Morris, “Why I Am a Communist”.
Morris recognises that communism is the true resolution between necessity and freedom, and also that the anarchist notion of absolute freedom is just so much hot air.
westartfromhere wrote: The…
Why do you think any of that is fine to say on anarchism? I am not sure what’s his excuse for such ignorance, but what is your excuse? Anarchists since the 1st International have long desired the forcible expropriation of all wealth by the exploited and creation of a socialist or communist society, exception being individualists and maybe mutualists. The question of “forcible imposition” is not even what has divided the socialist movement.
nastyned wrote: Don't like…
Bitten By Witchfever ( William Morris's term for deriding arsenic poisoning in wallpaper as a hoax)
"In the early to mid-19th century, many European countries produced wallpaper laced with arsenic. However, while Sweden, Bavaria, and others were relatively quick to recognize the problem and ban such products—England was not. And Britain was, incidentally, wallpaper Mecca in the mid-to-late part of the century. Its design prowess led to a correlating boom in demand, with a 2,615 percent increase in the production of wallpaper rolls alone from 1834 to 1874. As word started to spread about the products’ hazards, many erroneously believed that design items somehow differed from purposely toxic arsenic items, or that the issue was limited to the popular and newly created synthetic color known today as “emerald green.”
One of these skeptics was William Morris, ...Morris, who designed some of the most iconic wallpapers of the era (that were also arsenic-laced), ironically inherited his fortune from an arsenic mine in which he still held stock for a number of years. By the 1870s, the Morris family’s Devon Great Consols mine was one of a few mines reportedly producing over half the world’s supply of arsenic. And while Morris did ultimately divest his interests in the company, questions on his apparent hypocrisy—and why he never actually visited these notoriously bad workplaces—continue to linger".
Industrial uses of arsenic…
Industrial uses of arsenic include its use as an alloying agent to improve metal properties, such as in lead-acid batteries and copper alloys. It is also used in the production of electronic components like semiconductors (gallium arsenide), specialty glass, and ceramics.
Battlescarred wrote:…
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2005/EM/B413752N#!divAbstract
That’s the trouble with hard hitting journalism from VOGUE Magazine, it’s probably shite. Still rattling anarchos, still a don of wallpaper.