Relaunch and Recommended Readings

Machete 408 is back serving you up with a new series of postings after a summer hiatus. A continuing state of joblessness and downgrading to a slower internet connection both put a bit of a damper on the political juices that went into the blog. But despite these, there’s a nice backlog of recently published [...]

Latin American Anarchism

 
 A street mural by a Chilean anarchist cultural/muralist group (Read an interview with them in Spanish here).
  There’s a rich history and tradition of anarchism in Latin America that is still largely waiting to be translated and brought to the attention of the left and others who focus on the region. Below is a review [...]

Especifismo, Social Insertion and Recent Anarchist Organization

  A new edition of the “Especifismo Reader: Anarchist Organization and Praxis” has been made publically available. Topping 120 pages, the updated reader includes several newly translated pieces such as the short political statement “Who We Are, What We Want, The Path We Follow” by Coletivo Comunista Anarquismo in Brazil, the article “Anarchist Advances in Uruguay [...]

Thinking about hegemony

  Today a friend handed back to me a long borrowed copy of Arif Dirlik’s Anarchism and the Chinese Revolution (University of California Press, 1991). Full of nuggets and insights, the work is composed of several essays discussing the influence and role of anarchism from about 1900 to 1930; a period of tremendous social upheaval in [...]

Anarchism and Radical Governments

How should anarchists relate to revolutionary or left-wing populist governments? Should they denounce them out of hand? Should they join in the movement? What are the traps to avoid? This is an important question as radicalized populations are creating movements which give rise to alleged progressive governments. As capitalism goes into ever-deeper crisis we can [...]

Reader on Especifismo

 
An informal reader has been put together on especifismo, the anachist tradition and practice from Latin America that speaks for the need to form specifically anarchist orgnaization and for ’social insertion’ within social movements. With similarities to the currents of Anarchist-Communism and Platformism, the especifists argue for a particular understanding of the charactor of anarchist organization and [...]

Article Reposts: A New Old Left and the Left States of Latin America

Everybody Wants A New Old Left

By Elliot Liu, www.linesblog.com/

A response piece by Elliott Liu of APOC-NYC to two proposals for new directions, along with cohesion and regroupment among the socialist left. The first piece, Which Way Is Left is by Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a nationwide soft/post-Maoist group formed during the 1980’s with the merger [...]

Elections, illusions and movements

So sorry that I haven’t been posting up anything of my own lately. I guess I’ve been too caught up and without the same amount of time in front of a computer to kill as I had before. This is a great piece with a fairly sophisticated analysis of how anarchists relate (or do not) to [...]

The Debate Over Chavez, Revolution and the Role of the State

 

About two years ago I had some friends attending a revolutionary youth conference in Venezuela organized by folks connected to various Communist Parties (old school CPs here) which got me interested in learning more about Hugo Chavez and his supposed “Socialism for the 21st Century.” My friends came back severely disillusioned, but it was not as if they [...]

Interview with Flavio Sosa: APPO is questioning the traditional ways of doing politics

Translated to English by Chuck Morse, November 9, 2006

By Hernán Ouviña

Flavio Sosa is a member of the “provisional collective council” of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO, in Spanish). Despite being one of APPO’s most visible faces at the moment, he insists on stating that “ours is a movement of the grassroots, [...]