Author Archives: Jon Bekken

Do Anarchists Support Democracy?

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Do Anarchists Support Democracy?  The Opinions of Errico Malatesta

by Wayne Price. Available only online

In the current U.S.political crisis it is vital for anarchists and other radicals to be clear about their view of democracy. To this end, I am reviewing the opinions of the Italian revolutionary anarchist Errico Malatesta.

U.S. democracy, such as it is, is in crisis. The national leadership, under Donald Trump, is deliberately working to undermine what democratic freedoms the people have left. Peter Thiel and other ultra-wealthy businesspeople subsidize theoreticians, such as Curtis Yarvin, who openly reject popular rule. Read by people high in the Trump Republican administration, they advocate “monarchy” or rule by a national “C.E.O.” Continue reading →

Workers and Unions Need to Stand Up to Trump

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(Editorial, ASR 92, Summer 2025)

When the Nazis came for the communists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

—Martin Niemöller (1946)

Project 2025, the neo-fascist agenda written for Donald Trump by the far-right Heritage Foundation, is now being executed. The Trump regime has begun kidnapping immigrant workers from the streets, workplaces and schools and sending them to concentration camps. Court rulings that Trump’s victims be given their Habeas Corpus due process rights have been ignored. Even the courts themselves aren’t safe. ICE, the paramilitary police force ordered to begin the process of ethnic cleansing of the United States, now lurks outside courtrooms to arrest immigrants who have been ordered to appear. If the judge objects to her courtroom being used as traps to round up immigrants, the judge herself has been arrested by the FBI.
To their credit, some union leaders have protested the abuses by ICE and FBI by joining picket lines around the dungeons. Continue reading →

ASR 92 (Summer 2025)

Featured

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Contents:

Editorial: Unions, Workers Need to Stand Up
Wobbles: Crime Wave, Plutocrats, 4-Day Week, Recycled Lies, Bosses’ War on Older Workers…
Syndicalist News: War on Rojava, 3 1/2 Years Jail for Striking, IWW Strikes… compiled by Mike Hargis
The Cry of the Forgotten Tea Workers: A Call for Liberation by Bangladesh Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation
Articles: The Strike: Building Workers’ Resistance by Jon Bekken & Alexis Buss
Workers & Social Resistance to Trump and Musk by John Kalwaic
Vulture Capital’s Looting Regime by Jon Bekken
Bootmakers and Virologists: Anarchist Views On Expertise by Dana Williams
A Missed Opportunity: Britain’s Syndicalist Revolt review essay by Iain McKay
Reviews: Capitalism Goes Techno by Jeff Stein
Remaking Society review essay by Tony Sheather
Mutual Aid & Solidarity by Jon Bekken
Kropotkin’s “The Conquest of Bread” for Today: Anarchist Political Economics review essay by Wayne Price
Letters: Iran, Counter-Revolution of 1787

Flirting with Trump

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from ASR 91 (Winter 2025)

Several business unions are flirting with the incoming Trump administration, hoping that they can gain special treatment through obsequious flattery and cash payments. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien went so far as to speak at the Republican National Convention and donate union dues money to the Trumpsters. Now he claims this strategy has paid off with the appointment of a Teamsters-backed candidate for Secretary of Labor, former Republican congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer – who made occasional statements of support for workers during her single term. (Her voting record tells a rather different story.) Continue reading →

ASR 91 (Winter 2025)

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Contents:

WOBBLES: Unions Flirt with Trump, Possibilities for Abundance, Striking Robots, Prison Labor…
Resisting ‘Green’ Capitalism by José Luis Carretero Miramar, Rojo y Negro
SYNDICALIST NEWS: Factory occupation, Wildcat Strike in Myanmar, Turkey… compiled by Mike Hargis
ARTICLES: Martial Law Blocked by Unions and Feminists by John Kalwaic
Resistance in the New Trump Era by Jon Bekken
What Do We Do Now? by Jeff Stein
Hope in Hopeless Times review essay by Jeff Shantz
Altruism or Mutual Aid? review essay by Iain McKay
America’s Food Barons review essay by Tony Sheather
Contemporary Anarchist Archaeo-anthropology review essay by Graham Purchase
REVIEWS: The Jewish Anarchist Legacy by Jeff Stein
The Shop Stewards Movement & the Free Workers’ Centers from Joseph Cohen, Jewish Anarchist Movement
Fight Like Hell by Martin Comack
Bakunin’s Anarchism Reconsidered by Wayne Price

A Future Worth Fighting For

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Editorial, ASR 90

As this issue goes to press, the U.S. elections are two months away. One candidate promises to return us to the dark days of the 1950s, when America was “great” (for a few, though many unionized workers had stable jobs and could afford to buy homes); Democratic politicians insist that everything’s great and the millions who believe otherwise are being misled by the media and lying politicians. Most economists – who earn good livings apologizing for the capitalists at colleges, think tanks and commercial banks – agree, even if they would prefer wages to be lower and unemployment higher. Continue reading →

ASR 90 (Fall 2024)

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EDITORIAL: A Future Worth Fighting For
WOBBLES: Shorter hours, Expensive bosses, Right to resist, Paying polluters, ‘Humane’ exploitation…
OBITUARY: Remembering Frans deWaal
Syndicalist News: Swedish syndicalists fight for migrant workers
ARTICLES: Project 2025: What the Trumpists Plan for Workers and Unions by Jeff Stein
Global Immigrant Workers Protests by John Kalwaic
The Salish Sea Anarcha Network by Jeff Shantz
SPECIAL SECTION: A Future Worth Fighting For
The Beginning of an Anarchist Society by Wayne Price
Key Features of Anarchy by James Herod
What is Anarchist Economics? by Jeff Stein
Administering a Free Society review essay by Jon Bekken
Palestine: The No-State Solution by James Herod
REVIEWS: Solidarity: How to Change the World by Frank Rogaczewski
The Dilemma of Leninists by Iain McKay
The Left and the Israel/Palestine Wars by Wayne Price
Reviewed in Brief: Anarchist Communism, Canadian Wobblies
A Bureaucrat’s Responsibility to an Illegitimate State film review by Chad Anderson

Reform & Revolution: Noam Chomsky on Anarcho-Syndicalism

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An interview with Noam Chomsky was conducted in Boston on behalf of the ASR Editorial Collective by Jon Bekken and Mike Long on March 26, 1999. It took place in FW Chomsky’s office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is professor of linguistics and philosophy. Minor alterations have been made to clean up the transcript (removing false starts and such), and references and notes have been added where we think they may be useful to readers. It was published in two parts, in ASR 25 and 26. Some positions taken by FW Chomsky are highly controversial within anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist circles, as he is fully aware. ASR 26 and 27 also published responses and commentary on the interview.

This online version incorporates minor corrections and addenda appended to part 2 of the interview as published in ASR 26.

ASR: Barsky’s recent book [1] and snippets in your own essays over the years provide some background information on what first drew you to anarcho-syndicalism, and particularly to Rocker’s work [2] while still quite young. [3] What has maintained your allegiance over the years, preventing you, for example, from converting to some variety of Marxist belief system? Do you think anarchists have anything to learn from authoritarian socialists, and/or vice versa?
Chomsky: Well, a couple of the words I think are bothersome, like ‘allegiance’ and ‘convert’ and ‘belief system’ and so on. I don’t think anyone should be wed to a belief system any more than you are in the hard sciences. It’s not that these problems are simpler than the hard sciences. You’re not wedded to a belief system, you don’t convert, and as far as learning things from other people, no one owns truth and insight. You hunt it all over the place, you find your own mistakes, and you learn things from others.
This goes in every imaginable direction. So I don’t think there’s ever a question of maintaining allegiance. If we start thinking of dealing with the problems of life in terms of allegiances and conversions and belief systems and so on – if we can’t learn something from others – then we’re already lost. We’ve already departed from the realm of constructive, rational, moral discourse where any of these questions arise. Continue reading →

Finnish workers resisting attacks

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Finland’s right-wing government has proposed several laws reducing social benefits and restricting union activities. One proposed law would limit salaries to the rate paid in the export sector (part of the global capitalist effort to drive down wages to the lowest level at which it is possible to sustain life, enforced through global trade deals), and to restrict the right to general strikes and other strikes addressing issues that go beyond pay and working conditions so that they could not last more than a day. Some of these right-wing “reforms” have already been adopted.

Continue reading →

ASR 89, Summer 2024

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EDITORIAL: Are you serious, Mr. Fain? 

WOBBLES: Resurgent Labor?, Flirting With Trump, Workers’ Control & Safety, Expensive Rich Folk… 

SYNDICALIST NEWS: Argentine Workers Resist, Bangladeshi Unions, Spain… compiled by Mike Hargis 

ARTICLES: North Korean, Myanmar, Indian, Turkish Migrant Workers’ Resistance by John Kalwaic 

Labor Resistance to the War in Gaza by John Kalwaic 

The Vicious Cycle of Bourgeois Politics by Wayne Price

“Let them call me an anarchist!” M.P.T. Acharya and the Indian struggle for freedom by Ole Birk Laursen 

National Security: Bruised and Battered in the PRC by Marc B. Young 

A Forgotten Wobbly: José Ángel Hernández Across Two Nations by Steve Rossignol  Continue reading →