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a peaceful Europe should be supported by the lower strata of the people, albeit under proper guidance.6 ‘Justice will be above courage and only knowledge will be power. The more morality guides our actions the sooner justice and equity will form the basis of society.’ This search for justice and equity took Domela Nieuwenhuis on a political journey from radical liberalism to socialism, feminism and in the end to anarchism, but his political views remained deeply rooted in the bourgeois enlightened culture of the nineteenth century.7 In 1873 Domela Nieuwenhuis read
anarchism, illegalism (a philosophy that espoused criminal activity as a lifestyle), and leftist resistance in the years immediately following the war, and were also reflected in their approach to dada. 12 In their principled desertion of the national reconstruction effort, surrealists therefore attempted to abstain from complicity in many aspects of the capitalist system in which they paradoxically lived and produced, although that endeavour was rarely straightforward, and the results were often far from
the 1950s. The chapters in this collection, for the most part, do not concentrate on individual parties or groups, but look at wider left-wing movements such as Trotskyism, anti-revisionism and anarchism, or at those political and social issues where the left sought to stake its claim. Taken as a whole, the collection should demonstrate the extent to – and ways in – which the far left has weaved its influence into the political fabric of Britain. Little history has been written on the British far left in recent years. Since the dissolution of the CPGB in 1991, a
of personal politics, one that focused on culture and identity rather than law reform and voting patterns. Together they embody the variety of transgressive identities adopted by homosexual men from the 1950s onwards and show how Anarchism, pacifism or grassroots self-organisation seemed to be appropriate ways to develop the politics of homosexuality. Despite an assumption that homosexuality related to certain forms of decadent socialism as described in Chapter 1, these men show the variety of different political choices available and that in complex and sometimes
his strength’ (Law, 1891a); Tom Mann was restless, enthusiastic, and a born organiser, yet completely unforgiving once crossed (Law, 1891c); while the adventurous Cunninghame Graham had an artistic bent that inclined him towards anarchism rather than socialism or Marxism (Law, 1891d). However, it was the sketch of the strike’s publicist and chief negotiator, Henry Hyde Champion, that cut closest to the bone. Secretive, independent-minded, and sometimes regarded with suspicion by his allies and followers, Champion is depicted as inexorably bound to his own class
subcultural ideologies were adopted. Czech skinheads quickly looked towards the German and British skinhead scenes, from which they adopted an ultra rightwing political position. Punks, meanwhile, began to flirt more openly with anarchism. Some formed or became part of an organised anarchist movement, initiating protests and demonstrations against racism, fascism, compulsory military service, US imperialism (as with the visit of President George W. Bush to Czechoslovakia in January 1991) and the opening of McDonalds’ restaurants. They established links, too, with anarchists
because of his commitment to the negation of the present order, Benjamin’s apocalyptic last writings imply a form of anarchism.22 In a study of his early theological activism, Eric Jacobsen confirms the consistency of the anarchistic theme in Benjamin; characterising his position as ‘ethical anarchism’, Jacobson carefully explicates its crucial dimension of radical hope, a hope informed by the complete 110 THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF PUNK ‘transformation of society and the individual’.23 Redemption is synonymous with revolution in late Benjamin, where the concept of
London through this play on an idea of estranged vision. However, The Princess Casamassima, serialised in the Atlantic Monthly in 1885–86, is his only attempt to depict the world of urban poverty and political activism and to consider the estrangement of vision in London as a matter of socio-economic division, rather than as an effect of foreignness for the American abroad. The Princess Casamassima is a story of anarchism in London. The novel follows the fortunes of a refined young bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who presumes himself the illegitimate son of an
self-conscious politics of the anarcho-punk movement. British anarcho-punk emerged as a subcultural DIY musical scene during the late 1970s, picking up on some of the earlier punk rhetoric of anti-authority, anarchism and DIY culture and making them a central tenet of its perspective. Activists encouraged people in the scene from all areas of Britain to directly link the vibrant music to an attempt to collectively construct a politicised culture that encompassed ideologies and philosophies of anarchist/pacifist politics, personal freedom, anti-capitalism and animal
tendencies, which is why he senses a wry solidarity with Nordau, whose Zionism followed from the general denunciation of modernist degeneration. Huneker combined an appreciation of the French literary avant-garde that comprised accurate and original readings of Stendhal, Baudelaire and Flaubert, with a German genealogy of philosophical anarchism that went from Max Stirner, the radical Left-Hegelian, to Nietzsche, Huneker’s favourite philosopher. He reconstituted a systematic doctrine of egoism: ‘Nietzsche is the poet of the doctrine, Stirner is its prophet, or, if you