Rainbow Revolutions - Review

 

Its Pride Month in my local Library, so out of curiosity I picked this off the stand and decided to see what material was being made for younger generations. I'm sure this book was published to target school libraries and young readers. The book is stuffed with beautiful and highly colourful two page pictures that introduce every section, and each section is itself set out in a two page summary of the key facts about the topic. And the section dedicated to discussing the impact of Section 28 mentions that had it still been in force that it would've been impossible for this book to have been published.

I'm not in the target audience for the book, and while some of the more well known sections left me feeling like some important bits were cut out I did still learn some things from it, and I found it to be an easy read, I started and finished it in one sitting.

I can say with confidence that this book is miles better than anything that was available to me on Queer history and identity when I was still a pupil. But then, that's not surprising, there was nothing like this in my school library because most of my early schooling was in the last years of Section 28. A fact that this book reminded me. Looking back this explains why we went from no talk or discussion about Queer issues until 2004-5 when we suddenly had special and clearly very rushed lessons in biology and sexual education about how some people are Gay, Intersex or Transsexual (the term used at the time) and that this was natural and wasn't something to be vilified.

I really like this book, Its making a strong attempt to be as inclusive as possible and acknowledges some of the failings of the older Queer rights and liberation movements, there are sections on issues affecting Trans people, Women, Ethnic minorities, bisexuals and so on. I was also pleased that while it was congratulatory over the recent legislative reforms won in some nations like same-sex marriage and discrimination protections, it always qualified them with reminders that phobia, discrimination violence and other challenges didn't disappear with them.

The Funeral of Peter Kropotkin

 

 

 

 

 

 

Video link 

 

 Pyotr Kropotkin's funeral took place from 10th to 13th of February 1921, and it was documented by "Section of social chronicles of all-Russian cinema and photo publishing". English translation: ABC-Belarus

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpGu...

 

 

Work Pensions

 

This year, I've become a freelancer again, which means I get to go over my own finances. While looking through my financials, I decided to take a look at my work pension from my old job. This snippet jumped out to me. 

This policy was started in 2017, so it's about five years worth, but this figure is calculated on the assumption I'd stay on the plan until retirement age. This plan was set at the legal minimum requirement, so yes I could've paid more into it, but even the next level of contributions would've severely limited my take home pay that at that level was just covering my living costs, rent, bills, food etc. So it wasn't really a viable option, even a reduction of £20-30 every week would put me on shaky ground budgeting wise, and all for the promise of a minor increase in the year 2058. I was working for the national minimum wage an average of 42 hours per week, though it was not unusual for me to work more than that, and when I started at this job my hours were 60 per week with sometimes even more. The reason we were set to 42 was because me and another employee gave formal notice that we weren't prepared to do any more, and the company backed down. 

Work pensions were a controversial thing in 2017-18, but have largely fallen into the background since they were introduced. Personally, I think they're a terrible reform that should be scrapped. For workers on the lower salary ranges, they add another burden on take home pay, all for frankly nothing decades later, what will inflation look like in 2058? Will there even be a Pound currency or nation? I'd much rather have that £42 in my account now, so I can use it or actively save it, it wouldn't be remotely life changing, but it would be of use to me. Meanwhile, for higher incomes, they act as an extra incentive for loyalty to the company. I've seen several job listings that have a special workplace pension scheme that pays more than the government mandated system, and when I shared this information elsewhere, several labour aristocrat types showed up to condescend about how great their 401ks are and that I should pay more into my fund. So, it's worked on some people. 

Hell, I had one person give me details on how much their pension plan works, and he didn't seem to bat an eye that the employee pays more in percentage than the employer does, so even the matching part of the system has already been abandoned. Sadly, there are people out there who are so easily blinded by the promise of future money, they don't even care that the employers pay less than they do in a fund that was pushed on the message of "we're all in". If you pay 5% and your company only pays 4% (as in his example) they're ripping him off for an 1% and if he's already surrendered that 1% with good grace than he's already signalled that he can be ripped off provided it's handled appropriately.

Women as Sex Vendors; or Why Women are Conservative

 

 A marxists' confused attempt to argue that women are a petits-bourgeois class in society, both reactionary and privileged when compared to men.

The propertyless woman today is rarely reduced to starvation. If the price (or wages) offered for the sale of her laboring power are unsatisfactory, she may always supplement them through the barter or sale of her sex. That there are no women hoboes in the civilized world today is incontestable proof of the superiority of the economic status of woman over man.

The arguments are diverse and often contradictory, and there is absolutely no acknowledgement nor attempt to grapple with the contemporary women's movement, whose very existence rebuked most of his points. At the beginning of the book, the author mentions that there are few women revolutionists, so I suspect he was using this as an excuse not to engage with it. The Women's movement in particular the campaigns for suffrage and full civil rights were overwhelmingly reformist, but they involved a very diverse coalition of women from all backgrounds and political lineages, including revolutionaries like Sylvia Pankhurst. But even though for many political and social reforms were the end point of the movement it was an international movement that mobilised thousands of women to intervene socially and politically with an incredible diversity of tactics, from respectable petitioning to acts of terrorism, one Suffragette -Mary Leigh- threw an axe at the Prime Minister Asquith. 

 

And in response to this demand for reforms the suffrage movement was met with systematic violence, that included police beatings, arrests and torture by force-feeding hunger strikers.  

And he weakens any revolutionary purity grounds by comparing men to women and concluding that men are serious minded and talk and discuss things of importance like civil engineering. So I suspect this refusal to even acknowledge the existence of a mass and diverse movement of committed political reformers willing to make extreme sacrifices is less to do with purity and more to do with cowardice.

Also, largely ignored was the related movement by women to enter the workplace, thus giving up their beneficial sex commodity privileges in favour of the far inferior selling of labour that men must suffer through. I say largely because the author does grudgingly acknowledge women work but it's sparse and highly revealing. Apart from references to stereotypical jobs for women like stenographers there's a speculative passage on the First World War leading to massive social upheaval if it continues and forces more women into industry, and a criticism of women bringing down wages, which lays the blame not on the bosses or the weakness of the labour movement but on women themselves.

Women compete for jobs with men today, force down wages to a lower level and demand more from men before they will marry. And yet we see $25.00 a week stenographers giving up their positions to barter themselves, presumably for life, to $35.00 a week clerks or salesmen, rarely because of the mating instinct, but usually because of the personal triumph this means in the competition between members of the sex, and the social approbation which marriage brings.

Why compete for jobs and then ditch them as soon as they can attract a man with even a slightly higher salary? Selling labour power in this book is a negative, inferior way of survival in class society according to this book. This is not explained, the fact that women were increasingly pushing for access to work should be recognized as a major issue for the overall "biological and economic" argument, but instead it's just brushed aside because many of these women were still marrying. And where on earth is the evidence for why these relationships happen to come from? Either the author is thinking of one specific woman who earned $25.00 a week as a stenographer who married a clerk on $35.00 a week and told them it was for the "personal triumph this means in the competition between members of the sex, and the social approbation which marriage brings" or they're making assumptions.

Furthermore, several points can only stand up if you ignore or weren't aware of men in the sex industry. A key argument is that women are better off in the 1910s America because they can sell their sex in both marriage and prostitution, whereas men apparently could not. This is simply incorrect, men do in fact sell their sex commodities, both in sexual work and in courtship and marriage. Ultimately the approach being used in this book is the shotgun technic, the author lacks a killer argument to be the foundation, so it moves from one point to another but the relationship between them is rarely made clear and is only assumed, and  in numerous cases contradict one another.

One passage assures the reader that women are as capable as men at everything, and it's the economic system we live in that is to blame. But then a few pages later it advises only hiring male stenographers because they're smarter than women in that role. Another passage claims that listening to boys is always intellectually stimulating because they talk about serious topics like civil engineering, careers and politics, whereas girls only talk about boys and dresses. Another section relies heavily on Engels' Origins of the family to make its points for it. Most of the quotes concern the decline of maternal societies with the advent of industrial capitalism, one quote even refers to this as the "historic defeat of the female sex". But after that, the book makes the argument that women as a sex are superior to men because there are laws to protect women and in capitalist society laws are only made to protect the propertied, ergo women have more economic power. So Engels is correct that maternal society has been abolished and the key feature of this society was that women occupied privileged positions of power over men, turn the page and this non-maternal society we live in has as its key feature women occupying privileged positions of power over men. Unless Engels and the other historians named in that section were being brought up simply as an appeal to authority, this actually raises many questions over the orthodox marxist approach to stages of development.

The legal framework argument would also make the outlawing of child labour prove that it is the adult population who serve at the beck and call of the youth. Indeed, quite a few of the arguments in this book could be taken and altered slightly for "Why Children are Conservative".  

The book maintains a detached tone, arguing that the conclusions of the author are the result of economic and biological analysis and the attempt to get at the root of the issue. There are a few moments where this slips, usually when the author attempts to generalize from anecdotes or make absolute statements about things that have very obvious counter examples. But when the issue of divorce comes up, this falls away completely. The entire section is just a highly emotive tirade about how the courts and public opinion always sides with the woman and never the man.

If she be discreet, she may entertain lovers galore; she may refuse to perform any of the theoretical duties of the home; she may refuse to bear children or to surrender to her husband, without censure, and often without the knowledge of the world. If she be addicted to drunkenness, people will divine that her husband must have treated her brutally; if she be seen with other men, folks suspect that he neglects her.

If her husband seeks satisfaction for his desires elsewhere, she may divorce him and secure alimony; if he deserts her the law will return him to her side, if it can find him. If he fails to bring home the wherewithall to provide for her, she may have him sent to jail. If she discovers that he is getting the affection and the sex life which she has denied him, outside of his home, and if she buys a revolver and murders him in cold blood, the jury will exonerate her.

If a wife deserts her husband and her children, the law does not make her a criminal; for wife abandonment, the husband is held criminally liable.

No matter what the offense of the woman, custom and public opinion demand that every "decent" man permit his wife to accuse him on "just grounds" and to secure the divorce and call on the law to force him to pay her alimony for the rest of their natural lives.

No matter what the provocation, legally or sentimentally, no man can be exonerated for killing a woman. No matter how little the provocation, legally or sentimentally, any woman may kill almost any man, and the jury will render a verdict of Not Guilty. She has only to say that he "deceived her."

I looked it up, and it's not true, until the 1970s the easiest way to get a divorce was to move to Nevada because its requirements were less stringent, and you only had to live in the state for six months to qualify. Failing that, another Western state would do. These `divorce mill` states as they were called wouldn't have been needed if the tirade above were true. Until no-fault divorce was made legal in the US, you had to prove one spouse was at fault, if both were found at fault the divorce request was denied. During the period that this book was written, the majority of divorces were given to the wife 

During the whole period under study the over-
whelming majority of divorces were granted to the
wife, and this majority increased slightly through-
out the period. There is a definite territorial
pattern: The proportion of decrees granted to
women in the South, particularly the South Atlantic
Division, was always lower than in other areas.
During the early years of divorce statistics the
overwhelming majority of decrees in several
southern States were granted to husbands, but
this majority disappeared about the turn of the
century. On the other extreme, wives have ob-
tained about three-fourths of all decrees in the
West and, since 1916, in the North Central Region

 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_21/sr21_024.pdf

However, this still shows the dishonesty of the author's framing, husbands could obtain divorces if they wished and could prove the fault. 

To be perfectly honest, I suspect this pamphlet was authored as an attempt to promote a conservative conception of the socialist movement. During the war, the suffrage movement was making progress and women were entering the workforce in large numbers. It was only a matter of time before the number of women agitators and revolutionists increased significantly. Of course since it can't even acknowledge the existence of these currents its ability to head this off was doomed from the beginning.

The Public Domain Archive

I've launched another project to support the public domain. The Public Domain Archive

"Property is theft" -Pierre Joseph-Proudhoun

 Copyright, the mechanism for maintaining Intellectual property is a never ending series of headaches. It's an absurdity on the face of it, how can one claim ownership to concepts? When a story is copyrighted it's not the physical book that's owned but the idea and the specific way that idea is formed, produced and sold. By its nature, it limits art and expression and collaboration between people. Want to make a vampire story? Make sure it isn't similar to Bela Lugosi or Salem's Lot, otherwise that idea won't see the light of day, and you may even get a stern talking to by a law firm. 

Originally copyright was a movement championed by creatives, Victor Hugo was an early advocate of rights for creative workers like authors and painters,  "any work of art has two authors: the people who confusingly feel something, a creator who translates these feelings, and the people again who consecrate his vision of that feeling. When one of the authors dies, the rights should totally be granted back to the other, the people". And was a founding member of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, an organization of artists which in 1886 became successfully created what became known as the Berne convention, which is today the most common backbone of copyright law on the planet.

But as time has moved on and the protection of rights for artists has proven to be incredibly lucrative for the industries they labour for, the concept has simple gone off the rails. Hugo was also a passionate defender of the public domain and while he did foresee some provision for artists heirs, he believed that it was possible to balance and complement the interests of the two.

Here's a longer quote:

Literary property is of general utility.

All the old monarchical laws denied and still deny literary property. For what purpose?  For the purpose of control. The writer-owner is a free writer. To take his property, is to take away his independence. One wishes that it were not so. [That is the danger in] the remarkable fallacy, which would be childish if it were not so perfidious,  “thought belongs to everyone, so it cannot be property, so literary property does not exist.”  What a strange confusion!  First, to confuse the ability to think, which is general, with the thought, which is individual; my thought is me.  Then, to confuse thought, an abstract thing, with the book, a material thing. The thought of the writer, as thought, evades the grasping hand.   It flies from soul to soul; it has this gift and this force — virum volitare per ora — that it is everywhere on the lips of men.  But the book is distinct from the thought; as a book, it is “seizable,” so much so that it is sometimes “seized.” [impounded, censored, pirated.] (Laughter.)

The book, a product of printing,  belongs to industry and is the foundation, in all its forms, of a large commercial enterprise. It is  bought and sold; it is a form of property, a value created, uncompensated, a form of riches added by the writer to the national wealth.   Indeed, all must agree, this is the most compelling form of property.

Despotic governments violate this property right; they confiscate the book, hoping thus to confiscate the writer. Hence the system of royal pensions. [Pensions for writers, in the place of author’s rights] Take away everything and give back a pittance! This is the attempt to dispossess and to subjugate the writer. One steals, and then one buys back a fragment of what one has stolen. It is a wasted effort, however. The writer always escapes. We became poor, he remains free. (Applause) Who could buy these great minds, Rabelais, Molière, Pascal? But the attempt is nonetheless made ​, and the result is dismal. Monarchic patronage sucks at the vital forces of the nation. Historians give Kings the title the “father of the nation” and “fathers of letters;….. the result? These two sinister facts: people without bread, Corneille [the great French author] without shoes. (Long applause).
Gentlemen, let us return to the basic principle: respect for property. Create a system of literary property, but at the same time, create the public domain! Let us go further. Let us expand the idea.  The law could give to all publishers the right to publish any book after the death of the author, the only requirement would be to pay the direct heirs a very low fee, which in no case would exceed five or ten percent of the net profit. This simple system, which combines the unquestionable property of the writer with the equally incontestable right of the public domain was suggested by the 1836 commission [on the rights of authors]; and you can find this solution, with all its details, in the minutes of the board, then published by the Ministry of the Interior.

The principle is twofold, do not forget. The book, as a book, belongs to the author, but as a thought, it  belongs – the word is not too extreme – to the human race. All intelligences, all minds, are eligible, all own it. If one of these two rights, the right of the writer and the right of the human mind, were to be sacrificed, it would certainly be the right of the writer, because the public interest is our only concern, and that must take precedence in anything that comes before us.  [Numerous sounds of approval.]But, as I just said, this sacrifice is not necessary.

  Sourced from the Public Domain.org

Currently, the Berne Convention stipulates that copyright terms should last for the lifetime of the author plus 50 years. Which to me is outrageous, but it gets worse, it includes provisions for member nations to extend that and many have taken that option including my own the United Kingdom, in many countries its life plus 70 years, and in Spain 80, Mexico 100 years! And the United States is a cluster of confusion since it joined the convention in 1978 and has slowly, I mean glacially slowly, been moving its system to co-operate with it. 

So, not quite the dream that Victor Hugo imagined. Though personally speaking even if copyright were made according to Hugo's wishes I still would have issue. While I agree, in a world of capitalism and governmental authority it's important to protect the rights of its working people's, something that copyright has been very bad at doing, but let's think hypothetically and assume there's a rights' system that can actually do this quite well, why should people who share some civil or blood relationship get special privileges? And why should someone expect and be entitled to control over their creations for life? The idea of the system seems to be built on a false premise that all works of what we call art are the works of singular individuals. Hugo's appeal above keeps making a distinction between the individual artist and the collective audience, but that's not always the case. 

Architects can copyright their designs, but it takes the labour of many to make those designs feasible, so how is it fair that only one person in the process gets to reap the rewards, shouldn't the engineering team that build a bridge be paid every time that bridge is used or a higher one time fee per person for usage rights? That seems ridiculous, but that is in effect what our society compels us to do with art, rent a film or pay extra to buy a way of watching as much as you want, pay for tickets to the cinema or a concert or get a CD, subscribe to a streaming service etc. 

If you read copyright statutes, it becomes obvious that they're quite archaic, the one creator system works quite well for authors and painters and sculptors, the older forms of creation, but film and radio projects and even comics throw that into chaos. The credits for films often take ten or more minutes to finish because they're acknowledgements of work put into the film that is shown in the final product. So does the life plus system kick in once they've all died a long time ago? No, there's been a compromise, in many countries like the UK motion pictures are handled in this way.

A motion picture passes out of copyright after the term of copyright has expired for the following

1. Director
2. Screenplay Author
3. Composer

 But why stop there? The reason is that it just wouldn't be manageable to protect the rights of every individual who contributed to it, just like it wouldn't be profitable to extend architectural rights to builders. At least with this compromise, big studios can negotiate with only a handful of persons. 

And I don't want to even think about how they can decide who gets the term applied to video game and software development. Though, I notice I haven't seen any legal provision for them made in any copyright statute I've read.

Personally, I think the United States of America had a better way for handling art ownership. This feels weird to write since the USA has for the past few decades been the main enemy of the public domain domestically and internationally. Their approach was to tie it to the work itself and not the artist, so copyright was based on year of publication, and limited the term of protection with just one option of renewal and then that was it. Before the 1978 reforms, works of art were protected for 28 years and could if the owner chose to renew for another 28 years, so 56 years in total. This doesn't solve any of the issues of special rights for only certain types of work, and it conflates owners with creators, which isn't always the case and is increasingly rare in the entertainment and academic industries, most published works involve the creative person or persons giving up their copyright to the corporate entity publishing them. 

But it did ensure a lot of material entered the public domain in a more timely manner. If this benevolence is confusing, a major factor in this approach was that most works stopped being profitable for their owners in the middle of their first term. So some did not bother to renew, and some who did use the option only did so on the outside chance that a second windfall would come their way. This is why you have this strange situation where works are still copyrighted in the rest of the world but not in the US, and tangentially why it works in reverse, stuff is still copyrighted in the US and only the US, like the last two Sherlock Holmes short stories authored by Conan Doyle and the title of the Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, which collected the last set. Between the 1970s and 1990s the US passed a lot of legislation relating to copyright and intellectual property, virtually every single one of these updates place more power on corporate owners, but one of the worst damages was a 20-year freeze on the public domain. 

That's another area of the archaic nature of the copyright system, since on the internet we live in a global market that is increasingly standardizing and becoming uniform, and yet we still have to abide by a confusing patch work of rules, laws and limitations, at both ends. I live in the United Kingdom and so have to abide by the laws and norms of that territory, however as a user of the internet the laws that apply depend on each particular site, where its owners live or are based for tax purposes, and where the site is registered. If you've ever opened a link on a website or youtube video and seen some message along the lines of 

Unfortunately this site contains content owned by ____ who has blocked it in your territory

or

Unfotunately we cannot show this contents to your region as we do not comply with regulations in your territory

This is why. It's simply unworkable, I've listened to librivox recordings of things that aren't public domain in my territory, and I've shared stuff that is but not in the US. I have neither the interest nor the means to police other people's property for them, that was why there was so much furore over ACTA, SOPA etc. Those legislative moves were designed to force websites to become police officers for content owners, effectively studios and publishing houses. 

We can't keep going like this, I love art and want to experiment and share it. This is why I've started this blog as a way to celebrate and raise awareness of the importance of the public domain, creative commons, copyleft et al, and the wider movement for a free society.

 

Bookshop

 Over the past few months I've taken a few steps forward into the world of publishing, mainly translation and non-fiction work. This page is essentially a storefront, with samples and links to the works. Any income generated from these goes into a fund I have for purchasing out of print books for scanning and transcription. Sadly, the prices have been creeping up over the years, and I'm no longer in a position to fund acquiring them out of my wages.

 Author page

 

 FAQ

These are for sale on the kindle store, but you don't need an amazon pad to read them, you just need an amazon account, you can access a kindle cloud reader on desktop computers and download an app for phones and tablets. You can also download the files and port them to your own devices.

 

On Offence and Defence: A Speech on War & Revolution

 A translation of a speech by Wilhelm Liebknecht a prominent Socialist leader in 19th century Germany. The contents of the speech are an attack on nationalism, militarism and capitalist morality and an appeal for international brotherhood and social revolution. It covers and criticizes early industrial capitalism and Bourgeois society for its failures to solve social issues and argues coherently that on the contrary they are often the root causes of these problems, from poverty to political violence.

e-book link

 Online version.

Milicianas, Soldaderas, Petroleuses and the Yellow Mimosa: A Brief History of Female Revolutionaries

 A short introduction to the exploits of several women who took up arms to defend their communities and build a better world for all. Covers some key individual women, including the Communard Louise Michel and the Ortega sisters. Covers women participating in combat in many struggles from the French Revolution to the Cold War conflicts in Central America in the 1980s.

E-book link 

 Also, available in paperback

Is Socialism Being Built in the Soviet Union?: A debate between three revolutionaries

 

English translation of Ĉu socialismo konstruiĝas en soveto? by Eugene Lanti and his comrade M. Ivon. The text is an early exploration of the still young Stalin regime and the development of the Soviet economy and society eighteen years after the Revolution. The work was based on Lanti's own experiences with the Soviet Union and its government as well as over a decade of correspondence with hundreds of Soviet citizens who had contacted him to discuss events and support his work in international solidarity as the head of the World Anational Association (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda) a workers association that uses Esperanto to communicate and link workers all over the world.

Originally published in 1935 this is one of the early works to bring attention to some alarming features of Soviet rule and its experiments in building a "socialist" society. It covers many topics and had some predictions for the future and the approaching international conflicts. 

e-book link

Also, available in paperback

 Online version.

 

The Forerunners of Anarchism

  

An English translation of the French Individual Anarchist Emile Armand's Les précurseurs de l’anarchisme a philosophical history of Anarchist thought from the philosophers of Antiquity to the thinkers of the Industrial Revolution.

The book traces the evolution of thought and belief in liberty from Ancient Greek philosophers through dissident Christian movements and Enlightenment thinkers and the impact of the 18th century revolutions in France and America.

 e-book link 

Online version.

 

 

Darker Phases of the South

 Darker Phases of the South was Frank Tannenbaum's attempt to grapple with the totality of Southern society from its roots. It tackles the rise of the KKK and explains how such an institution could exist and thrive into the 20th century, the economic foundations of the South from cotton crops to land ownership and working conditions in its many Mill towns, and also the deplorable state of its prisons and shocking treatment of its prison populations. Finally, Tannenbaum attempts to promote a way forward for the South that would end these injustices and build if not a Utopia than a better society with less racial and social friction.

 e-book link

Also available in paperback

Note, this book is a re-issuing of a public domain and increasingly rare text and is only available in territories where the copyright has expired. 

 

The Pyramid of Tyranny

e-book link, also available in paperback
Online version.

 

An English translation of F. Domela Nieuwenhuis's essay De piramide der tirannie (The Pyramid of Tyranny). The essay is an early attempt to grapple with and expose the systems of power within class society and how the people might one day disrupt and overcome this system of oppression. Though written over a hundred years ago, the society it critiques and attacks is still very much with us today. This means that aside from some cultural references, the work remains fresh and revealing.

The Libertarian Society: A translation from the French Workers Movement

 

e-book link, also available in paperback.

Online version.

Translation of the 1926 pamphlet advocating for a new society based on the principles of Libertarian Communism. The original author George Bastien was a lifelong union militant and Anarchist activist who spent many years fighting the class struggle in France and abroad. Libertarian Society was his answer to the sceptics who accused revolutionaries of being nothing more than violent destroyers and shows us how a potential new society could be built on the principles of solidarity, equality, liberty and mutual aid.

 

 

The labor movement: its conservative functions and social consequences

 e-book link, also available in paperback.

Frank Tannenbaum's examination of the labor movement and its social-political impact. Weighs up the strengths and weaknesses of the Socialist Party, the American Federation of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World methods of organising and the impact they have on the working class and wider society.

 

Robert Owen, Idealist

 

E-book link, 

Also available in paperback.

An introduction and evaluation of the Socialist and Co-operative ideas of Robert Owen, possibly the most influential of Britain's 19th century reformers and political advocates.  Written by C.E.M. Joad for the Fabian Society in 1917.

Notes on the life of Eduardo Vivancos 1920-2020; Almost a century in the Libertarian and Esperanto movements

A version of this article first appeared in Liberte Ouviere un Journal Anarcho-syndicaliste

 

Notes on the life of Eduardo Vivancos

1920-2020

Almost a century in the Libertarian and Esperanto movements

Reddebrek

2021

 

“Paroli Esperanton estis iam esenca parto de anarkiismo.”

(There was a time when speaking Esperanto was an essential part of being an anarchist.)

On the 30^th of December 2020 Eduardo Vivancos passed away at the age of 100. He leaves behind a family and nearly a century of dedication to a number of causes, from athletics, Anarchosyndicalism, and minority languages, especially Catalan and Esperanto. I think his life is worth remembering, and while in the Spanish speaking world his death was marked with numerous tributes and retrospectives, including a feature in Corredor a popular magazine dedicated to running, and a lot of friends mourned him in Esperanto texts, he is largely unknown in English. A short blog post I wrote to mark his passing is the first hit when his name is searched in English, though there was also an article in Fifth Estate #400 written in 2018 by his fellow Esperantist Xavier Alcade that serves as a short introduction. Personally speaking, Vivancos’s writing was some of the first I read in Esperanto that I could mostly understand that wasn’t written as a teaching tool, though Vivancos did dabble in that as well. I suppose I should credit Vivancos with pushing me from viewing the language as a hobby into something to be taken seriously.

The son of Domingo Vivancos, Eduardo Vivancos was born into a working-class family in Barcelona on the 19^th of September 1920. In 1934, shortly before his fourteenth birthday, Vivancos left elementary school and became an apprentice. In September of that year Vivancos had also enrolled in a worker’s school (Escuela del Trabajo) which held classes in the evenings. While at the school he mixed with a group of young workers who were members of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) an organisation that he would join along with becoming a member of the Student Federation of Free Thinkers (Federacion Estudiantil de Concienecias Libres).

A year later Vivancos would join the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), he would remain a member of the CNT for the rest of his life. In 1936 Vivancos looked forward to the People’s Olympiad that was being prepared in Barcelona as an alternative to the official Olympics that were being hosted in Berlin. The first piece of writing I read by Vivancos were his recollections of those days when he would go to the training grounds and practice and mingle with hundreds of foreigners from dozens of nations. The enthusiasm of the time made a big impact on him, unfortunately there preparations for the games coincided with the beginning of the bloody civil war and the appearance of Franco as a political leader. The games were not only called off at the last minute by news of the revolt of the Spanish army, but the preparations for the games had also been targetted by a campaign of fascist sabotage and intimidation.

During the Spanish Revolution and Civil War Vivancos initially focused on his studies, enrolling in the Ateneo Enciclopedico Popular, where among other subjects he was taught Esperanto. He would remain an active Esperantist for the rest of his life, often combining it with his activism with the Libertarian movement. In 1937 the Spanish Republic created a number of Worker’s Institutes (Institutos Obreros) a high school system for workers, Vivancos passed the entrance exams in December 1937 and enrolled. However the war situation continue to get worse for the Republic and so in 1938 Vivancos and some fellow class mates from the institute volunteered to serve in a battalion of the 26^th division of the Durruti Column and served at the Montsec front and saw combat at the battle of Lleida, and participated in other operations.

Whilst serving in the 26^th division Vivancos was part of a small teaching and correspondence circle of Esperantists which included Gines Martinez the battalion commander. At the time most of the Spanish left and Libertarian movements had embraced Esperanto and were publishing Esperanto newspapers. From the Communist Party of Spain, to the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) the CNT and other Anarchist groups, and even the General Government of Catalunya, all were actively using the language to broadcast news to the outside world and establish contacts with sympathetic foreigners. In response to this the Esperanto movement was singled out for bloody persecution within Fascist zones. An example of this repression was the fate of the Esperanto club in Cordoba, the Fascist Falange party organised a firing squad and murdered its entire membership.

Unfortunately as we’re all aware, the war continued to go badly and the revolution continued to retreat, by February 1939 Vivancos along with thousands of other committed anti-fascists had to escape Spain to France. Vivancos did this on foot, crossing the Pyrenees in winter. While in France the Vivancos family were separated and sent to concentration camps that had been built by the French government to house Spanish refugees. He was moved from one camp to another over several years, at one point in 1940 he was billeted in the same barracks as the famous Catalan author and poet Jaume Grau Casas, the author of Catalan Anthology and many other works. The two communicated almost exclusively in Esperanto, if anything the incarceration and constant transferring seem to have boost Eduardo Vivancos’s studies and teaching of the language.

The Vivancos family were not reunited until after the Second World War in 1947, by that time Eduardo had met and fallen in love with fellow Spanish exile Ramona Comella, the two married in Paris on the 5^th of December 1945, they had two children, Floreal (1947) and Talia (1948). While in Paris Eduardo Vivancos joined the World Anational Association the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda or SAT, and organisation of left-wing Esperantists of many tendencies from around the world.

Also in the aftermath of WWII the Spanish Libertarian movement began to reorganise itself and planned out strategies to resist the entrenched Franco dictatorship. As part of this process, the FIJL had decided to build an international federation for Anarchist youth. As part of this project Vivancos was made a delegate of the Spanish section. Unfortunately, this plan did not progress much further due to the global weakness of the Anarchist movement at that time. A more substantial attempt at international networking was the founding of two Esperanto language newspapers the Nigra Flago (Black Flag) and Senŝtatano (Without a State), Vivancos was a contributor to both and editor of Senŝtatano. This activity would bear some fruit, the correspondance service of Senŝtatano sucessfully exploited a relaxation in hostility to Esperanto by the Spanish government to send letters to Spain, this reconnected many exiles with family and friends still living under Franco. And the contact with foreign Libertarian minded Esperantists like the Chinese anarchist Lu Chen Bo and the Japanese anarchist Taiji Yamaga led to increased co-operation in many ways. In 1963 Eduardo Vivancos and Taiji Yamaga worked together to produce a Spanish translation of the famous Chinese philosoper Laozi’s Dao de Qing, it was titled “Libro del Camino y de la Virtud”, Book of the way and Virtue in English.

In 1954 Vivancos emigrated to Toronto Canada and would remain a resident until his death in 2020. He maintained his commitment to his two life causes Esperanto and Anarchism and his opposition to Franco while living in Canada. He joined the Asociacion Democratica Espanola Canadiense ADEC, a group for anti-francoist Spanish migrants and exiles living in Canada. As a member, he attended demonstrations and organised meetings. Eduardo Vivancos would return to Spain in 1976 after a 37-year exile, when the Francoist regime crumbled and a stilted democratic transition was taking shape. He would make many visit to Spain and the Catalunya region throughout the remainder of his life. In 1986 he gave a lecture to the 59^th Congress of SAT in San Cuget on the 5oth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, the lecture drew heavily from his recollections of the atmosphere and conditions on the streets of Barcelona and the Spain in 1936.

At the end of his life Eduardo Vivancos received many honours from SAT and the wider Esperanto community, and with nearly a hundred years of dedicated activity including on the front-lines on a mountain range it’s not hard to see why. But I also find his writing and the way he was able to use Esperanto to support the goals of international solidarity and libertarian resistance very inspiring too. I said at the start that Eduardo Vivancos is little known in the Anglosphere, I hope to correct this. In addition to writing up this short memorial, I am also translating his Esperanto texts in English and working on an English language wikipedia article to complement the already existing versions in Spanish, Catalan and Esperanto. By doing this, I hope others will learn of him and an be inspired.