Good morning Comrades! Before we get into the longer weekend edition just a subtle reminder that today is the last day to pick up either the L/S or S/S of the Riot Smiley Drop. Hit the picture below to head on over to the online shop.
It’s Rosa Luxemburg’s 150th birthday and even though her life and work is worth celebrating daily, obviously this round number warrants a closer look. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation is offering a number of online symposiums today and whilst you are there, do take some time and go through their online offering. It’s a wonderful resource about her life, her work and the importance of it all for our present and future.
Again, since it is Friday and that still doesn’t really mean much here are two more articles that I wanted to share with you for your reading pleasures.
The Kronstadt Uprising: A View from within the Revolt. On the 100 Year Anniversary of the rebellion. While both anarchists and apologists for Lenin and Stalin often portray the Kronstadt uprising as a conflict between anarchists and party communists, this is a misunderstanding that has arisen as a result of subsequent conflicts. Rather, the Kronstadt uprising represented the final rupture between the autocratic dictatorship of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and every other communist and socialist current in the country, as well as anarchists and other elements of the working class—especially those to the left of the Bolsheviks, as the Bolsheviks had adopted many right-wing policies by that time. Essentially, the conflict among Russian anti-capitalist revolutionaries was about whether power should be vested in a one-party dictatorship, in representative electoral politics, or in horizontally organized workers’ councils [soviets].
This is an excellent article on the hunger strike of Dimitris Koufontinas, the spark that has ignited severe riots in Athens and throughout Greece once again. The relevance of the entire situation to us all is clear and I cannot recommend this text more.
If that’s all left a rather bitter, dry aftertaste, here are two musical suggestions for your weekend that need no introduction whatsoever.
There is a LOT of the fuckening about, again and as much as I want to provide a running commentary to it all, again these email size filters will fuck this up. Maybe this is something I should be doing per video, even though the idea of seeing my fuck off mug on youtube gives me a stomach ulcer. Thoughts?
Podcast?