Anarchists In Love (The Generation Quartet)

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Read’s acceptance of a knighthood for his literary achievements had already discredited him amongst many anarchists. But, at the time of his visit in 1959, he was still the most prominent anarchist in Britain and his published writings had considerable influence on, amongst others, Murray Bookchin.

Historians of sexuality often struggle to obtain personal testimony from everyday people about their experiences of sex. Footnote 157 Indeed, Chris Waters suggests that many such histories have ended up relying on the self-justifications of sexologists whose written record of the history of sexuality is more forthcoming. Footnote 158 La Revista Blanca's advice columns, by contrast, presented testimonies surrounding gender and sexuality from lay perspectives – of all genders. Even accounting for the biases of the periodical's editors in selecting which queries to publish, this genre of material has much to offer historians. Public Humanities and Collective Education at Ithaca’s Socialist Night School – Empty Hands History on Marxist Reading Group: Introductory Syllabus Anarchists also participated in AIDS activism, although they critiqued the state-centric elements of the movement. ACT UP drew upon many anarchistic values and practices: it was decentralized, grassroots, and direct-action oriented, and it operated outside of the state in many ways. Members formed alternative health networks, squatted buildings for people with AIDS to live in, provided safer-sex education, volunteer service organizations, and more. [8] Despite this, ACT UP focused largely on spectacular actions meant to pressure the government to act on AIDS. Anarchists generally rejected this strategy on principle. Goldman's experience in Russia and her later criticism of Bolshevism had a significant influence on the young anarchists who struggled with the revolutionary turmoil of 1920s China. Prior to their deportation, Goldman and Berkman were both optimistic about the prospect of the Russian Revolution as the beacon of people's awakening. 27 However, during their stay in Russia, Goldman and Berkman witnessed the repression, corruption, and mismanagement of the Bolshevik government. 28 Their profound disillusionment led them to leave Russia in late 1921, with the hope of freely criticizing the Bolshevik regime and carrying on their fight for the anarchist cause. Goldman's vehement condemnation of the Bolshevik government in her book My Disillusionment in Russia, published in 1923, positioned her as one of the earliest critics of Bolshevism. 29 Goldman stressed that her book was based on close observation, earnest study, frequent meetings with people of various political opinions, and extensive travels across Russia and not merely on partisan anarchist ideology. Her final decision to speak out, she remarked, was "for the sole reason that the people everywhere may learn to differentiate between the Bolsheviki and the Russian Revolution." 30 The Irish American writer Frank Harris (1855–1931), in his short biography of Goldman for My Disillusionment in Russia, noted that the book captured "the first authentic picture of the Soviet Government." 31 Although this book provoked opposition from many international socialists and Communists, it was promptly embraced by her junior adherents in China. As they engaged in an ideological struggle with the Communists, Goldman's insight into the authoritarian nature of Bolshevism served as a great source of inspiration for the Chinese anarchists to maintain their antistate stance. I remarked to the interpreter that I had not seen a policeman, & he answered as I expected, that they were not needed since the Liberation.in leading the national/social revolution. In the end, anarchism in China faded away as a major force in radical politics after 1928, when the GMD nominally unified China. 9 It was during the 1920s that Goldman was likened to a "spiritual mother" by such radical students as Ba Jin and exerted great influence among young Chinese anarchists. 10 Seven of Colin Spencer's plays have been performed since the first production in December 1966 at the Hampstead Theatre Club of The Ballad of The False Barman. It was directed by Robin Phillips and featured Caroline Blakiston, Penelope Keith and Michael Pennington. The play is a musical fantasy set in a beach bar run by a bald-headed lesbian "barman" and peopled by whores of various sexes and their clientele, including a transvestite thieving vicar.

in which Foucault says that ‘by Islamic government, nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.’ Foucault also seemed to believe that under such an Islamic government, ‘between men and women there will not be inequality with respect to rights.’

Beyond participating in queer activism, anarcha-feminists argued that there was something inherently queer about the anarchist rejection of all structures of social domination. For instance, Highleyman notes about the anarchist contingent at the 1993 march that “Gay, Lesbian, Bi, hetero or undefined, all the anarchists were queer in their own way.” [5] Lin L. Elliot goes further, arguing in a powerful article linking queer and indigenous resistance that the “new activism of the 80s and 90s has already shown us the way. ACT UP and, more recently, Queer Nation, embody an unmistakably Queer perspective; non-hierarchical, even anarchical, they combine seriousness with humor, politics with play.” [6] Queer and anarchist politics both embodied this non-hierarchical, fluid approach to the world. One woman whose contribution to Spanish anarchism is exceptionally well-documented is Federica Montseny (1905–94), the daughter of La Revista Blanca's co-founders and one of its most prominent writers from the age of eighteen. Footnote 24 When the Second Republic (1931–6) replaced Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923–30), female suffrage was granted which made political participation more possible for women. In this context she began writing for Solidaridad Obrera, the organ of the CNT, and these connections led her to be chosen from among Spain's leading anarchists for the role of Minister of Health and Social Care in 1936. In her first year in office, she oversaw the legalisation of abortion and contraception, as well as promotion of sex education and research into sexual science. Footnote 25 She and La Revista Blanca had intervened into anarchist debates about gender and sexuality for years prior to these reforms, yet on these matters this anarchist periodical has attracted somewhat less historical attention than others such as Estudios or Iniciales which were more singularly committed to sex-reform content. His scholarly interest in food culture and history led to the publication of The Heretic's Feast – a History of Vegetarianism in 1993 (also published in the US in 1995, and winning a special mention in the Premio Langhe Ceretto prize of Italy), the award-winning British Food – an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History in 2002, and his recently published book From Microliths to Microwaves – The Evolution of British Agriculture, Food and Cooking, an account of the long history of farming, food and cookery in Britain and how our national cuisine was forged. From early on Colin Spencer's creative instincts were applied to food and cookery, and in 1978 his book Gourmet Cooking for Vegetarians was published. That was followed through the 80s and 90s by a series of other cookery books, totalling 18 in all. Spencer received many awards for his food writing, including the Guild of Food Writers Michael Smith Award, the André Simon Memorial Fund Special Award, the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for the Best Culinary History Book in the World, and the Glenfiddich Cookery Writer of the Year Award.

Spencer spent his period of National Service as a pacifist in the Royal Army Medical Corps until 1952. [1] He subsequently lived in London, Vienna, Athens and on the Greek island of Lesbos. His first novel was published when he was 28. His portrait of E.M. Forster was painted when he was 29. He married twice and had three grandsons and a great-granddaughter. [1] Spencer’s first novel, An Absurd Affair, was published in 1961, but it was with his second, Anarchists in Love (1963), the first in the four-volume Generation sequence, that he began to garner widespread critical acclaim. Seven more novels followed between 1966 and 1978, including Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex (1966), Asylum (1966), an

That said, as her actions showed, Goldman had always emphasized the duty of anarchists to "become part of the strivings of the people," to quote her reply to Ba Jin on May 26, 1927. In his earlier letter to Goldman, Ba Jin indicated disappointment over the "narrow stand" that his comrades were taking in the multipronged rivalry among the imperialist (northern warlords), Nationalist (GMD), and Communist (CCP) powers in China. In her reply, Goldman encouraged Ba Jin and his comrades to be active agents of social revolution—to "keep close to the people"—so as to further its process as a reconstruction. Goldman made two points regarding anarchists' place in revolutions. First, revolution was not, and never should be, the monopoly of nationalists or other partisans. The mission of anarchists was to help awaken the people's will to rebel while directing the course of revolution toward liberty and well-being for all. Second, anarchists should not collaborate with any political parties that sought to establish a new government to replace the old one. In sum, Goldman expected her Chinese comrades to be with and fight for the people and to foster spiritual, intellectual, and economic awakening in China. 79 As the only Chinese anarchist who had had in-depth conversations with Goldman in person, Qin Baopu initiated a propaganda campaign against Bolshevism that drew upon her ideas and writings. Qin claimed that, in the two and a half years after he left Moscow for Beijing in 1923, his writings "were all deeply influenced by Goldman." 32 These articles, many of them serialized in various newspapers, later were included in his three books, Chi e youji (赤俄遊記 Travels in Red Russia), Eguo geming zhi shibai (俄國革命 之失敗 Failure of the Russian Revolution), and Eguo geming lun cong (俄國革命論叢 Essays on the Russian Revolution). The Chinese translation of Goldman's book on Russia, entitled Buersheweike zhi baozheng (布爾什維克之暴政 The Bolshevik tyranny) also came out in 1923. 33 In 1924, Ba Jin published articles in the anarchist magazine Min zhong (民鐘 People's tocsin) that referenced Goldman's works on the Russian Revolution. 34 The numerous translations and publications inspired by Goldman's anti-Bolshevism confirm Dirlik's comment that Goldman's writings "were responsible in large measure for shaping Chinese anarchists' attitudes toward the Soviet Union." 35 By rendering her writings into Chinese, Qin Baopu and his comrades contrasted authoritarian Bolshevik rule with the false liberating image it enjoyed among leftists and liberals around the world. Spencer’s first novel, An Absurd Affair, was published in 1961, but it was with his second, Anarchists in Love (1963), the first in the four-volume Generation sequence, that he began to garner widespread critical acclaim. Seven more novels followed between 1966 and 1978, including Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex (1966), Asylum (1966), and Panic (1971), books that one critic has said ‘revel in the eccentric, the bizarre, and the grotesque’.

in which Chomsky’s colleague, Michael Albert, praises Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution for a ‘vision that outstrips what any other revolutionary project since the Spanish anarchists has held forth.’ In 1980, Albert was similarly naive about China’s Maoists, claiming that they may have genuinely wanted ‘greater worker and peasant power’.[4] Goldman's two-year experience in Soviet Russia had compelled her to "transvalue" her views on the nature of revolution and the task of anarchists, on which she often reflected during her exile. Primarily, Goldman had forsaken anarchists' "old attitude to revolution as a violent eruption"; rather, she began to assert that "revolution must essentially be a process of reconstruction." 75 Her proposal involved intensive educational work and advocacy for the expansion of democratization, among other strategies. 76 The task of anarchists, in Goldman's opinion, was to lead the revolution toward the process of reconstruction through means that would serve "the ultimate end of all revolutionary social change" to "establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being." 77 "The function of Anarchism in a revolutionary period is to minimize the violence of revolution and replace it by constructive efforts," Goldman concluded in a 1938 letter. 78 By the late 1910s, Chinese translations of Goldman's writings began to surface in the progressive press as well as in anarchist publications. In 1917, Yuan Zhenying (袁震瀛 1894–1979), an English major with anarchist leanings at Peking University, chose "Marriage and Love" as his first translation of Goldman and published it in Xin qingnian (新青年 New Youth), a leading left-wing liberal monthly in China that later promoted communism. 21 Meanwhile, Yuan and his anarchist friends issued translations of Goldman's "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty" and "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For" in an essay volume published by their Anarchist Society. 22 In 1919, Yuan's translation of Goldman's "The Modern Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought" was published in Xin qingnian. 23 These translations together contributed to Goldman's "enormous popularity during the [May Fourth] New Culture Movement," as Arif Dirlik noted. 24 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1970/aug/13/a-special-supplement-in-north-vietnam/; http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm; http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/09/324051.html; https://stevenlukes.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/lukes_chomsky_debate_1980_1981-2.pdf; Noam Chomsky, ‘After the Cataclysm’, vol.2.Colin Spencer was born on 17 July 1933 in Thornton Heath, London, [1] and was largely brought up in the south of England. From an early age he knew that he wanted to paint and write. He attended Brighton Grammar School and went on to study at Brighton Art College, but later came to feel himself to be wholly self-educated. His colourful family provided his youthful imagination with rich material for his later novels, as did his passionate emotional involvements with both men and women. Anarchists in Love and Rage (1989-98) pushed the struggle for queer liberation in radical directions. Members actively participated in gay and lesbian marches, developed an anarchist approach to queer politics, and joined ACT UP in fighting for people with AIDS. The commune is divided into five brigades – we were in the Peace Bridge brigade & had then to listen to all the statistics for the brigade. Then a description of how it all works, most interesting – but the most important fact is that these communes are autonomous, which makes them anarchist from my point of view; and they are successful – Production has gone up by leaps & bounds, earnings of workers have doubled, schools & clinics have been provided (33 doctors in this one commune – ten years ago there was none). Many other improvements. … The advice columns of La Revista Blanca represented a microcosm of the explosion of anarchist press attention devoted to sexual revolution in the interwar period. As a venue of political, medical, and cultural thought they platformed the voices of men and women from a range of social classes and generations, giving them the opportunity to feel empowered, obtain sex education and receive medical care, as well as adding their contributions to the ongoing evolution of radical discourse surrounding bodies, birth control, and free love. Responses to their queries, from the Montseny family or Doctor Javier Serrano Coello, on one hand destigmatised women's embodied traumas, instilled pride in readers’ bodies, offered practicable guidance about reproductive hygiene and safety, and granted dignity to sexual pleasures outside of procreative marital sex. On the other hand, their advice was ever underpinned by eugenic motivations, concerned with the (subjective) evolutionary betterment of the human species, which placed significant limits on the permissiveness of the sexual revolution that they envisioned and prefigured. The obligation to serve a collective revolutionary struggle was forever in tension with the impetus to ‘free’ oneself as an autonomous individual. Footnote 159