M. E. O’Brien’s article from the magazine Commune provides six steps for abolishing the family and beginning to provide for ourselves.
“The family is a lifeboat for those abandoned by capital, but fails and thwarts far too many. We need other ways to organize care and organize ourselves.
1. Set up a protest kitchen.
2. Expand insurgent social reproduction.
3. Build communes.
4. Combat the return of the family.
5. Raise children of the commune.
6. Expand opportunities for survival.”
In this speech, Frantz Fanon discusses the effects that colonization has on the culture of those colonized. Additionally, Fanon explores the connections between liberation and culture.
“The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture.”
Frantz Fanon – who was born in the French colony Martinique – extensively wrote about decolonization. According to Fanon, decolonization is always a violent process. The violence involved in decolonization for Fanon is a cleansing process for the colonized and violence is necessary for complete liberation. This conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth is a call to action for decolonized African nations. Fanon warns against European and Western thought. Instead, he advocates for the creation of a new man, a new consciousness, and a new way of thinking.
So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature… if we want humanity to advance a step father, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and make new discoveries.
This book is a collection of cartoons by Jacob Burck that comment on a vide range of political and economic struggles, such as fascism, imperialism, and black liberation, but has an underlying focus capitalism and the worker.
“It is necessary that you penetrate to this reality, that you see the truthful core of these presentations, until, with more and more ardent partisanship and more and more anger, you unite together.”
Henri Barbusse, Introduction
This article was written by Garry Hill who worked at the Tonsley Park Chrysler plant in Australia in 1976 during the workers’ struggles – that he actively participated in.
“The text tells of the conflict inside the factory, the rough and tumble of mass meetings, workers’ resistance to production, the tactics of management and the role of the trade union- in this case the notorious Vehicle Builders’ Union.”
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics discusses the ways in which the patriarchy infiltrates everyday experiences of women, including sexual relations. This chapter – chapter two – is titled the Theory of Sexual Politics. It discusses sexual politics and the subjugation of women ideologically, sociologically, economically, anthropologically, and more.
The Radical Women Manifesto: Socialist Feminist Theory, Program and Organizational Structure is the manifesto of the Radical Women (RW). RW is an intersectional, multi-issue based organization rooted in intersectional, socialist-feminist ideology. This excerpt of the manifesto describes their platform and demands regarding legal rights, economic equality, unions, healthcare, education, the environment, and more.
Our platform reflects the wide spectrum of issues that Radical Women has taken up over the years, though it cannot begin to be a complete list of all the stands we take as we intervene in the ever-changing struggles of oppressed people all over the world
Nikolai Bukharin – a Bolshevik revolutionary – discusses the need for not only economic liberation but also spiritual liberation of the working class and its party. He asserts that religion is a detriment to the workers’ struggle. He calls for a separation of church and state and religion as a private matter. Additionally, he states that schools must free education from capital and religion.
The worship of the souls of the dead rich was the foundation of religion…
The church was an organization of the bourgeois state…
The organs of the local workers’ authority shall have control over the schools, and shall not stint their energies in the matter of popular education, supplying to all the children and young men and young women all the knowledge which they need for a happy life.
This letter, written in 1871, calls on “the republicans of the world” to support the Paris Commune and rise up against the common enemy.
The war they will find will be that of a mass uprising, irregular corps, hidden marksmen, ambushes, surprises, shrubbery, ravines. It’s extermination by all means, the people in a fury, the unknown…
Written in 1980, this introduction to Dale Spender’s Man Made Language explores the patriarchy and its presence in language. Spender discusses how language has been a means for constructing and sustaining the patriarchal order and how one can disrupt that order.
Some of us, however, have decided to stop. We no longer wish to give substance to patriarchal order and its integral component, the superiority of the male. We have started to formulate different rules for classifying the world, rules that are not based on the assumption that the proper human being is a male one and that female is a negative category. We have begun to codify the meaning that woman is an autonomous category and we are beginning to make this version of the world come true.
The Paris Commune rejected the authority of the state and aimed to form and consolidate its own republic that was “the only form of government compatible with the rights of the people and the normal and free development of society.” The Manifesto of the Paris Commune, written in April of 1871, attempts to explain the reasons for and rights of the commune.
The Commune has the obligation to affirm and determine the aspirations and wishes of the populace of Paris, to define the character of the movement of March 18, misunderstood, unknown and slandered by the politicians seated at Versailles.
The Paris Commune in 1871 was a complete dismissal of the sovereignty of the state. This document, from September 1870, displayed the articles presented by the Federated Committees for the Salvation of France which aim to abolish the state and put power in the hands of the people.
Article One – The Administrative and governmental machinery of the state having become powerless, it is abolished. The French people remain in full possession of itself.
This report, submitted in 1793, describes the arguments for replacing the Gregorian Calendar with the Republican Calendar. The change of the conceptualization of time was a disruption of society and everyday life.
In October 1793, the French National Convention ordered the use of the Republican Calendar to replace the Gregorian Calendar. The Republican Calendar was made to depict agrarian imagery and dismantle the lies of the throne and church.