May Day 2021 greeting

Greetings on International Workers Day!

Please check out a May Day message from the IFA Secretariat (who are currently the FAI in Italy – this role rotates amongst the federations making up the membership of IFA ).

The Bristol group of the Anarchist Federation previously published a nice read about the anarchist origins of Mayday including the Haymarket Affair in Chicago mentioned in the above message. Also, our 25th anniversary issue of Organise!  magazine 77 from a decade ago has articles we have previously published about the Paris Commune which was especially influential on the development of anarchist communism.

Earlier in the year we celebrated and remembered the bravery of the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921.

Two articles from Bristol about Porkie Pies

Update: 4pm today (Saturday) in Nottingham, Forest Fields – details in Tweet: https://twitter.com/open_nottingham/status/1375471612099710981

Here are links two new blog articles that should create resonance in Nottingham considering the past action of the police here, not least as this year it is the 10th anniversary of the ATOS 2 incident where police attempted to stifle protest against medical tests for disability benefits with an wideranging injunction and a dropped case against the two arrested. This was obviously largely politically motivated judging by a police officers’ remark on the arrest that there “had been too much of this sort of thing and we were told to crack down on it”, which echoed the earlier arrests of Nottingham Uncut activists.

It’s also nearly a decade since Nottingham played a part in the days of protests and riots in England following the death of Mark Duggan who was shot dead by police in August 2011, after which a Birmingham court judge prevented the airing of a BBC TV programme about it, relating to a Reading the Riots report by the Guardian and London School of Economics (the programme was eventually aired in August 2012).

The first piece from the Anarchist Federation’s Bristol group is their report of the first Bristol #KillTheBill protest showing “how the police lie in order to build a false narrative. How the corporate media facilitates this by printing their lies as undisputed fact, and how the police’s cheerleaders both professional and amateur will take these lies and run with them.”

They have today followed this with a another blog giving “run down of just a some of the lies police and their supporters have been caught out on in the last week.” The 7 lies includes the admission, obtained from a Freedom of Information request, that no police got broken bones or punctured lungs from the first protest on Sunday 21st March, as was widely reported in the media.

Reading matters. Organise! 93 & Sparrows’ Nest digital library update

Dear comrades, hoping you are well. Couple of bits of news to keep in touch.

Sparrows’ Nest library and archive just finished another round of sorting, cataloguing and digitising with a list of 87 new items on website (just under 2GB of additional data). Direct link
https://thesparrowsnest.org.uk/index.php/14-news-and-events/225-new-additions-to-the-digital-library-december-2020-part-2 The Nest thanks everyone for all support and interest in its work and will be taking a break for a couple of weeks, before diving back into the boxes in the new year, but will keep an eye on emails, so if you need anything, don’t hesitate to get in touch (see contact tab on website).

From the Anarchist Federation a lovely new 88 page issue of our magazine Organise! #93 is now available for purchase or free PDF download and a screen-reader page turning version is here: https://organisemagazine.org.uk/2020/11/17/organise-93/ The best way to support Organise! and get print copies (full colour & glossy) is via https://www.patreon.com/Organise and single print issues can be obtained from AK Press https://www.akuk.com/ – order this issue or search on Organise! or Anarchist Federation for back issues.

London Anarchist Bookfair – virtually

Quite late notice but you can find out about the online Anarchist Bookfair happening this weekend here:

https://anarchistbookfair.london

There are live programmes:

https://anarchistbookfair.london/events

To watch and participate in the live event use Twitch:

https://www.twitch.tv/londonbookfair

This is an open channel but to ask questions during the talks you either need to download the Twitch app on a mobile phone/tablet or create a Twitch account on a computer.

Great talk from Belarus ABC this evening about the uprising. There is a full programme for Sunday starting at 9.30am with tips on how to publish a magazine like Organise! from its current editor.

Pages from the Blasted Past

Get a dose of 10+ years ago on t’internet by visiting the newly archived website of AF-North, the Anarchist Federation in Manchester and the North-West as it was then. From here you can find the contemporary (as in equally old) websites of the Anarchist Federation and the International of Anarchist Federations in all their static HTML glory, before all this database-driven malarkey and social media. Here also you may feel the impulse to click nav-bar links and visit the pages of Solidarity, Subversion and Wildcat from even further back.

For a slightly less musty aroma, at least in terms of web technology, visit Notts Save Our Services and No Borders Nottingham legacy sites which still have a lot to say about the state of the world in 2020.