From ASR 82

A week after a military junta took over the country and declared a state of emergency, protests have spread throughout Myanmar. Textile workers and students quickly went on strike against the army takeover; an initiative which grew in size and scope until it became a nationwide general strike.

Among the unions calling the strike was the Federation of General Workers Myanmar, which has worked with the syndicalist International Confederation of Labor. Demonstrations, strikes and marches continue across the country, including in the factory areas of Shwepyithar, Hlaingthayar and Mingalordon, in the industrial belt of Yangon.

Together with other organizations of the Anti-Junta Mass Movement, the FGWM has signed a declaration demanding the abolition of dictatorship, full democracy and respect for civil liberties, repeal of the 2008 Constitution (imposed by the military) and the immediate release of those arrested by the army during the coup and the protests.

All too often, the media focus on prominent political figures when reporting on events such as these. However, now, as always, it is the workers who make things move forward, who take to the streets to confront the repression, who bring the country to a halt with a general strike and, ultimately, who can stop the coup.

This is not the first time that working people have risen up to confront military dictatorship. When this happens, the army can only back down or unleash bloody repression. All the sections of ICL wish the best for our comrades in Myanmar. They know that they can count on our solidarity and support, as always. [ICL]

Janet Biehl, Ecology or Catastrophe – The Life of Murray Bookchin. Oxford University Press, 2015, 332 pp.

Review by Tony Sheather. A condensed version of this review appears in ASR 82

Murray Bookchin died in 2006 at the age of 85. He was less widely known than Noam Chomsky as a libertarian internationally, yet a dynamic American voice in the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s. Where Chomsky became the academic voice of conscience and dissent in challenging U.S. foreign policy, Murray Bookchin fought on the edges of society, urging social and political transformation. While praised widely for his revolutionary wisdom in earlier years, towards the end of his life he became a figure of conflict and controversy.

Nonetheless, despite conflict and controversy, his influence as a leading American anarchist and social ecologist in articulating modern perceptions of these philosophies has been profound. Ecology or Catastrophe, the Life of Murray Bookchin by Bookchin’s later life lover and collaborator, Janet Biehl, reviews his life and legacy. It explores the development and the impact of his ideas particularly on the radical youth of his era, notably those of the 1960s and 1970s, in the United States. The theoretical and personal divisions of the late 20^th Century within the anarchist and ecological movements are described. These themes will be discussed here. Continue reading →

Industrial Workers of the World Preamble

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people, and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system. Continue reading →

2 Editorial: Death Squad America

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Editorial, ASR 81

As we write the U.S. election is still impending, and so we cannot know which candidates won. What we do know is that once again workers have lost.

We faced a grim choice between a president who cheers on police and neofascist thugs as they shoot down protesters and a former vice president who suggests it would be better to merely maim us; a president who encourages his followers to ram their cars into anti-fascist protesters and his opponent’s suggestion that instead “anarchists and arsonists” be arrested and prosecuted for our thought crimes; a president who loots the treasury for his personal benefit and a man who spent his entire career shilling for the banks and insurance firms, helping them pick our pockets and shielding them from being held culpable for their crimes. Continue reading →