Obama: Change You Can’t Believe In.

The election of Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 was one of the most celebrated electoral victories of recent times. Not since Nelson Mandela’s win in South Africa, following the collapse of the Apartheid regime, was the supposed power of the ballot box so publicly celebrated and displayed.

Obama’s victory was hailed as a triumph for the ‘democratic process’ and was widely touted as a fine example of how people power and electioneering can trump entrenched bigotry and money.

Full version here. Published in the Irish Anarchist Reivew [Issue 3]  May 2011.

Pamphlet: Parliament Or Democracy?

The French Revolution of 1789 put an end to the idea that some people were born to rule. In only a short number of years one of the oldest and most powerful monarchies in Europe was swept away. In its place came the idea of legal equality and individual rights as set out in the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.’

The basis of these new rights, established on foot of a great social upheaval, was the real hallmark of the French Revolution since it was accepted, from that point on, that laws and how they were made were the expression of the ‘general will’. As such these laws could be made and unmade as that ‘general will’ was discerned. This was the real break with the past.

At the time of the French Revolution the idea of the ‘general will’ was still new in politics. Even so the implications for the future were not difficult to make out. Sixty years earlier, in England, during the Civil War the very same issues had come to the fore. If the monarchy was to be dispensed with, what type of society should replace it? What exactly constituted the ‘general will’? And, as importantly, in whose service was its rule to be applied?

Read the full version on line here.  Or download the pdf here.   First published by Workers Solidarity Movement (Ireland) 1993.  Second edition (Expanded) 1995.

75th Anniversary of the Spanish Revolution!

This month, 75 years ago, one of the most significant democratic movements in human history got underway in Spain.

The onset of the Spanish Civil War will be remembered by many for the tragic and valiant struggle that took place in Spain to stem the tide of fascism in Europe.  It is certainly important to remember and celebrate that struggle that took place in Spain between 1936-39.  But less well known and more important – to my mind – was the democratic revolution that took place in Spain between 1936 and 1937.  It was an immense revolution and it ushered in a new economic and social order where workers and farm labourers organised and controlled this places of work and their communities.  For an important and significant period of time a different way of organising society and economic production – where human needs came ahead of profits – held sway.

Let’s face it, in today’s world – where inequality is rampant; where poverty and starvation is rife while the world’s wealthy party on; and where environmental destruction seems never ending – it is important to remember and cherish this possible way forward for human kind.

Even now the scale of the revolution and the  its achievements are not fully acknowledged.  Although this is a situation that is gradually being reversed – with more academic research now focused on this important revolutionary period in Spain’s history.

Over the long period of this anniversary I hope to look at different aspects of the revolution and its eventual fate.   There’s no real plan here other than to cover topics of interest whilst completing research for a fictional work that is in part set in revolutionary Spain – of which more much later on.

But first a salute to those that resisted dictatorship and fascism and in the process opened up  a real window of hope for a viable and free socialist society.

Related articles and further reading:

• Anarchist sources on  The Spanish Revolution